Anora (2024)

A joyous moment that is being used to sell a downer of a film

I liked ANORA. It has some great moments and one extended set piece that is one of the best things I've seen in the movies all year. However this talk about it being the best film of 2024 and the probable Oscar winner has to stop.  I mean the film is easily the least film from Sean Baker and it has all sorts of narrative, character and tonal problems.

The plot of the film film has a girl named Anora, but who goes by the name of Ani, meeting Ivan, the son of a Russian oligarch, who becomes infatuated with her. On a trip to Vegas he proposes and they get married. Right after they get back to New York his parents find out and send their men to put a stop to it. Ani's husband flees and she is forced to help run him down before the parents arrive the next day. Billed as a romance the film is a grand tragedy as it all goes to shit in the end.

The simple response to the film is that once the first act ends the second starts with the family's men showing up and Ani being forced to help them track down her errant husband the film actually works until you realize that you knew how this was going to go from the start and you were just waiting to see how everyone is emotionally left broken (The not so romantic comedy is going to end as an unhappy tragedy). It's largely unremarkable story telling with nothing to say that we couldn't have worked out in the first five minutes.

The one thing the film has that makes me really like the film is a stunning sequence that is the start of the second act when the father's men are sent to find out what the hell is going on and if the rumors of marriage are true. The sequence in the house from their arrival until they head off on the chase is quite simply one of the best sequences in any film this year. Hell, it's better than most other complete films. The problem is it's the only one where you actually have real characters doing real things. Its the only one that doesn't feel contrived and angling to get us to the predetermined downbeat ending.

As I've said one of the biggest problems with the film is that there are no characters. Everyone, with the possible exception of the fixer, is one note. No one arcs. That maybe the point, Baker may have wanted to show us characters who never learn, but they never feel real as a result. Watching characters who are not real so much as cliche cut outs is tough. And while it maybe the point, I didn't want to watch characters who spend the first third of the film smoking, drinking and screwing and nothing else.

The truth is Baker's so incredibly lazy in his construction of characters that you know how empty and vapid a character is by how much a character smokes.  The more some one smokes anything the less complex they are simply because their use of tobacco, weed or vape is their character trait. Its also true of a lesser extent alcohol or pills which is only brought in so that something bad can happen. It's as if Baker created everyone on a spread sheet checking off traits to signify who they are or how they will react. The result is characters who are limited in characteristics and personality. 

What is truly annoying is that Baker's view of anyone in their twenties seems to be that they are still children who never learned impulse control or to grow up. He views his characters as simply as the person who once reduced Romero and Juliet down to the statement that it's "a three day love affair between a 13 year old and a 1 year old where  6 people die", except no one dies here. And while that simplicity is true of the Shakespeare play, which works because of the shading, Baker gives us no shading so his characters are non-entities. Baker has no real respect for his characters because there is nothing to them, their lives are getting wasted or getting laid. These are the least interesting people you can think of. Their selling point is one is a sex worker and the other is rich. What is there to them beyond that? Nothing. Honestly I would not want to be with these people in real life because they have nothing going on in their lives so why would there be a reason to see them on film? Baker never gives us a reason, even in a throw away line so the characters remain one note. The only two interesting characters in the whole film are the fixer (who we see at a christening indicating a bigger life) and the bald goon Igor, who takes pity on Ani who we see go to his grandmothers apartment indicating a bigger life.

The lack of arcing in the characters makes the film kind of pointless and ultimately dull. I mean why watch the story when you know that in the end Ani is going to be back where she started  but with the addition of the emotional kick to the gut of her relationship being bogus because her husband is really just a horny infant. More to the point why didn't you just make this a tragedy from start without the bogus comedy center? This isn't a story, so much a pointless shaggy dog story.

Tonally the film is a mess. It';s billed as a romantic comedy but there is no real romance just sex confused as love. The opening bit is a by the numbers meet cute and "romance" between people who only have sex in common. It's so by the numbers that there is no emotion, the sex scenes are not sexy, sure Ivan enjoys, but it it's mechanical and by its largely rote for Ani, who has to teach Ivan to be a lover. The film then shifts for the kick ass scene in the house which mixes humor and suspense, before shifting to broader comedy for the chase around the city, before turning again, this time into something tragic in the final bit as the parents come to town. Very little of it feels genuine, all of it feels as though it was set up to manipulate the audience. Again it's Baker working off the spreadsheet instead of writing about life.

I dragged from section to section, never carried along.

Looking at Baker's spreadsheet design, the dramatic structure  isn't really well done. Things happen just to drive the film and kill time until we get to the ending which reveals the film to be a remake of the original draft of PRETTY WOMAN. The opening act is rather cliche in that we know where it's going to go, we have to have a "romance" for the rest of the film to have a reason to happen. The start of the second act may be brilliant, but after confounding our expectations the film settles into a more or less chase mode where funny things happen but nothing is serious until a certain amount of time runs when Ivan is found to be hiding at Ani's old place of employment. Why did he go there? Because he never would have been found otherwise. Baker needed him to be found by Ani's friends so they could be directed to him. And in perfect example of why the film is badly and unoriginally plotted, not only did Mr Baker do the cliche thing of having him hide out in Ani's old work place but he also had him fool around with Ani's enemy.  Seriously? The film truly lost my respect there. The final third of the film has the parents arrive result in several sequences that wrap up the action but do so in a completely unremarkable way. And I don't mean that so much as we know how it's going to go, but rather the sequences and characters of the parents are so badly written  as to be cliche and events are so minimally written as to not let events play out but simply march the characters through events because we have to get to the ending. There is no shading to anything just what is required to explain where things are going as if it was pulled off an outline.

It's not bad, but it it isn't really good either. It all just sort of is. This feels more like a film made from a first draft script instead of one that was worked on over time. 

Walking out of the theater to the train with Nate Hood  He argued that the point of the film is to show that these people didn't change and didn't arc, and that they were vapid. But my argument back was then why tell us this story? What is the point of telling this story, in this way with heightened emotion and comedy, if we are going to end up with a depressing down beat ending? Honestly the final scene in the car should have wrecked me, and would have had Baker had any handle on the film's narrative rhythms. I don't see the point of giving us expectations of one thing of a possible Hollywood romance, only to have us crash into a brick wall? As I said this should have been played as what it really is trying to be, namely a real world PRETTY WOMAN (what that film was supposed to be) without the humor.

Personally if the film had ended with the shot of Ani's confused face staring at the Igor, who was nice to her, instead of her screwing him the film would have worked better because at that very moment the film would have given Ani an entire arc because she seemed to grow up and realize how badly she fucked up and how things could have/ should have gone. We did not need, nor should we have seen her slip back into her old ways of connecting through sex. For me had the film ended with her face and the instant arc I would have loved the film because the film would have come together in an instant, instead of coming together in order to simply fall apart.

Despite the many serious flaws I do like the film, but I can not see why anyone thinks this is anything near the best of the year because it's not. Anyone saying that is wrongly over hyping the film.