It’s official:Anoratook home five Oscars last Sunday. Joining the ranks ofgreat movies that almost won the Big Five, it won Best Original Screenplay, Best Editing, Best Director, Best Actress, and Best Picture. Congratulations toSean Bakerfor winning four of those Oscars (tying Walt Disney for the amount of Academy Awards won in a single ceremony), and congrats toMikey Madisonfor her Best Actress win. It was a big night for independent cinema, and Baker’s speeches ranged from thanking the sex worker community to telling people to visit the movie theaters (which are on the decline).
The four Oscars that weren’t Best Picture surely help to explain what makesAnoraa movie that deserved to win this coveted trophy, but there are more specific reasons. From the tremendous acting to the fact that they filmed this on location, there are so many aspects that help foster the necessary verisimilitude of a movie that it could make your head spin. Likewise, the story beats and visual style are enhanced in so many ways that it would take too long to list them all here. That said, some elements are more important to this film’s success than others. It’s still hard to rank such important details, though, sohere are 10 reasons (in no particular order) whyAnorawon Best Pictureand the hearts of audiences all around the world.
10Impressive Tonal Changes
Subverting Audience Expectations in Compelling Ways
Just when we think we know what kind of movie we’re watching, it switches up on us.Anorabegins as something of a modern romantic comedy. Ani is a stripper who is introduced to a Russian oligarch’s son at work, and Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn) soon becomes so enamored with her that he proposes. She accepts, and it feels like this young woman from Brighton Beach is going to live a life of enormous luxury. But then the newlyweds are told they have to get their marriage annulled immediately.
Seeing no way out, Vanya runs away. It’sa hilarious turn of events in what we thought was a love story. With the struggle that ensues and the arrival of Vanya’s godfather, Toros (Karren Karagulian), the plot suddenly revolves around finding Vanya in time for his parents' arrival,essentially becoming a screwball comedy. Everyone is going to be in a lot of trouble with powerful Russian oligarchs if they don’t. Then, when that’s resolved, the final section surprises and moves us witha deeply somber, tragic tonethat conveys the trauma of everything Ani has lost.These tonal shifts are extremely difficult to pull off, and Baker brilliantly executes them without losing our suspension of disbelief.
9The Setting
Hyper-Specific Places Add to the Film’s Authenticity
The bulk ofAnorais essentially a search, which means thatwhere this search takes place is importantto the story in more ways than one: the tone, the plausibility of finding that person, etc. Vanya flees his mansion in Brooklyn (the most populated NYC borough), meaning that this frantic attempt to locate him is practically doomed to fail without some extraordinary luck—not to mention that Vanya could take a train to any other borough (or nearby state).
There’s an important sense of community that’s established throughoutAnora.
The fact that it’s winter also makes NYC feel less like a tourist-filled metropolis and more like a vast, empty space that reflects Ani’s inner turmoil. There’s also an important sense of community that’s established throughout the film: in the Manhattan strip club where Aniworks, the community at Brighton Beach (from which Madison honed her accent), and the famous Coney Island. The strip club has had certain tropes in cinema and television over the years, but here it feels like a workplace where people form relationships (good and bad).Details like this make the movie more realistic, showing why filming on location can be so important.
8The Humor
Makes the Movie Easy to Watch
Anorawouldn’t be a Sean Baker movie without a sense of humor, and it doesn’t disappoint. Itdoesn’t always attempt to be funny, but it works when it does. Many of the laughs are brief: listening to Ani and a co-worker tell stories of the creepy guys who come into their strip club at the beginning of the film and watching a distressed hotel manager ask the bellboy what he’s waiting for are two great moments that are easy to miss. There are more prolonged laughs, too: everybody arguing over whether to walk to the car or find another parking spot on the pier, for instance, is very funny.
There’s also a slapstick element to the filmafter Vanya runs off and Ani’s alone with the henchmen Igor (Oscar-nominatedYura Borisov) and Garnik (Vache Tovmasyan). They try to hold her down and prove comically inept at it. The young woman winds up breaking Garnik’s nose, a huge mess is made, and the reaction from the perplexed Toros is terrific. Garnik being in constant pain is a good bit throughout the rest of the movie, and details like these accumulate to make this one ofthe best dramedy movies with great actingever made.
7Nuanced Depiction of Sex Workers
Helps Change the Narrative of People in a Taboo Industry
Image via NEON
Sex workers usually don’t get a lot of depthin the realms of film, television, or any other media, really. It has become more common nowadays for a member of that workforce to be the main character, but there are still a lot of tropes to undo. There is also the necessity to portray them in a three-dimensional way that humanizes them and avoids harmful stereotypes. Many would say thatAnorasucceeds in this respect, which fans of Sean Baker won’t be shocked by. This isn’t his first movie with a compelling character who gets paid for sex, and it probably won’t be his last.
Baker follows the old storytelling tradition ofexploring the American Dream, but this film helps legitimize Ani’s profession by showing her in that same kind of narrative that Hollywood has been telling for generations with characters who have more socially accepted jobs. Ani is a young woman who’s trying to make a living, falls in love, gets married, becomes rich overnight, and loses it all.We can all relate to that dream and the disappointments it brings. Along with showing how wrongly discriminated against she is based on her work,Anorais another step in the right direction.
6Sean Baker’s Direction
As Detail-Oriented and Emotionally Moving as Ever
Sean Baker is the kind of director who goes the extra mile tomake everything in his movie feel real. Every conversation inAnora, whether it’s an argument in the dressing room of a strip club, an awkward exchange between two people who loosely share two languages, or a big party in a huge mansion, feels like it’s really happening. That’s not just great acting at work;it takes a director who knows how people speak, how the rhythms of the conversations work in all these different ways, and makes sure the languages spoken are done so in ways that native speakers will appreciate.
Baker is also great at handling the camera in such a way that we can infer what a character is thinking (or wonder what they might be thinking). For instance, the complexity of characters like Igor and Toros gradually and unexpectedly emerge as the story unfolds. There’s also his ability todepict the emotional roller coasterof Ani’s ordeal without the movie feeling like it’s gone off the rails. There are too many other details to mention here, but viewers affected byAnorawill get why Baker’s Academy Award for Best Director is well-deserved.
5The Production Design
Help Us Both Believe and Feel the Wealth
SinceAnorainvolves a Russian oligarch’s son, the film needed to sell the fact that this young man is spectacularly rich. Much of this is captured in Vanya’s demeanor, but the onus largely falls onthe production design to really wow the audience. Given how fundamental it is to the plot, both thematically and on a storytelling level, there can be no doubt. That’s why Vanya’s Brooklyn mansion (which is someone’sreal mansion overlooking the Mill Basin), all those fancy hotels, and that private plane are so important.
The mansion is key, though, as it can be more difficult than one might think to make such opulent spaces pop and feel like they’re not from a set. Those wide, enormous windows show not just where we are geographically but also just how far removed this mansion is from the regular, grittier New York experience. They even help set the tone, depending on the weather. The contrast between all these fancy rooms and that prolonged search for Vanya (on foot and by car) iskey to this film’s insistence on subverting our expectationsof the well-trod, happy-ending fairy-tale.
4Character Absences
Symbolically Rich
Several of the characters inAnoraeitherdon’t show up or disappear for long stretches of time. There is considerable buildup to Toros' arrival when his goons are trying to keep Vanya and Ani in the mansion—a scenario that tells us that Toros will be both an authority figure and a comedic one.Then there’s Vanya, who totally abandons his wife to escape capture from his parents' employees. As Ani and the henchmen search for Vanya,the guy almost becomes an abstraction: an idea of true love, marriage, and great wealth—all these things that make up the American Dream and increasingly seem out of reach the longer he’s gone.
As for Vanya’s parents, they’re not even seen until the very end—and yet everyone, from Vanya to the men chasing him, are so afraid of them throughout the film that their supreme power makes us feel bad for everyone who answers to them. When the oligarchs finally show up, all this buildup beforehand helps make their presence even more intimidating and meaningful: they represent the level of socio-economic status that Ani and the henchman can never reach.
3The Henchmen’s Performances
Essential to the Movie’s Tone, Humor, and Themes
Toros, Igor, and Garnik areessential to the movie’s tone. They need to be serious about trying to get Vanya back and keeping Ani under control, yet they have to do so in a way that makes this ordeal funny.Anorahas been calleda movie of three parts, the second of which falls into the screwball comedy genre. Much of thistonal shift relies on the men in chargeof getting this spoiled brat’s marriage annulled, and they do an excellent job at that. Garnik is suffering from a broken nose and some pretty bad side effects, Igor is a relatively calm and rather ambiguous figure, and their boss is frantic.
The more time spent with these henchmen, the more we’re able to sympathize with them a little.
The way these three different personalities play off each other and Ani’s character is perfect for the kind of argument-based humor that ensues. Yet, the more time spent with them, the more we’re able to sympathize with them a little, too. It’s important that they don’t really want to hurt anybody, and it’s also important that Vanya is revealed to be just as immature as Toros claims. In the end, the sense that these guys are just trying to do a high-pressure job that the rich are making extremely difficult makes themmore relatable than the audience expected.
2The Ending
Emotionally Devastating
What an ending. It’s hard to describe it, butperhaps the best word would be elegiac. Although no one has died, Ani has just had her heart broken by her shallow ex-husband and his extremely influential family. She was in love, living the high-life, no longer having to do any work for money, but now she’s back where she started. She spends her final night in the mansion with Igor, whom she has hated and accused of being a sicko throughout the movie. As snow falls outside, they have a bonding moment.
The next day, Igor drives her home in his grandmother’s car. After some talking, Ani initiates sex with him—which is an extraordinary arc for their relationship to take. As the man tries to pull her down for a kiss, she stops. Then he stops, and she sobs. He comforts her in silence as the snow falls outside, and that’s how it ends. There is so much going on here, and it leaves the viewer witha profound sadness that’s hard to shake. It’s the kind of scene from which you’re able to pull many different meanings, culminating in one ofthe greatest movie endings of all time.
1Mikey Madison
The Movie’s Success Relies on Her
Mikey Madison’s breakthrough turn as Aniwon her the Academy Award for Best Actressin one of the more competitive years for that particular category. Good for her;she earned that awardjust as much as any of the other nominees.Madison’s character is the life and soul of this film, and she gives such a charismatic turn that the viewer cannot look away. Though other superb actors share the screen with her, there’s no question thatAnorais dependent on Madison’s central performance.
From taking pole-dance lessons to spending time in Brighton Beach to get that specific accent down pat, Madison did the research required of Sean Baker’s neorealist influences.She inhabits this role so well, and there are so many different emotions that swirl through her head throughout the film that the audience truly feels like they’ve been swept away into her story. Balancing a comedic performance with a powerfully dramatic one,Madison arguably makesAnorawork more than any other single element. Bravo!
NEXT:‘Every Movie to Win the Big Five at the Oscars, Ranked’
