Rando Report: I Hated Anora, a Burberry Scarf Craze, and More
Donna Karan goes back into her archives.
The Rando Report is about things that I’ve been reading and seeing…
I Saw Anora, and Hated It
My former boss told me that the main character of Anora would have been me in some other warped universe as a rotten-mouthed, flat-chested dancer who speaks bad Russian. Director Sean Baker shot the film in Brighton Beach, a part of Brooklyn I have long frequented. I was intrigued.
The main character is the exotic dancer/sex worker Anora “Ani” Mikheeva played by Mikey Madison. She’s an inky-haired, second-generation Russian and speaks the language with a heinous American accent. At the strip club, she meets the young spawn of a Moscow oligarch whose cash promises security. Private planes are chartered. There’s a cornucopia of lap dances. Punches are thrown. Fuck you motherfucker is said.
Everything is filmed in New York, not your sterile Upper East Side or Soho or West Village or Park Slope, Brooklyn, but a different, less captured part of New York.
At its core, the setting, Brighton Beach, is certainly raw. The bottom tip of southern Brooklyn, which hugs the Atlantic Ocean, resembles a snapshot of the corrupt post-Soviet Union. There are still whiffs of lawlessness that came with the newfound free market independence that swiftly bludgeoned Eastern Europe in the early ‘90s. And that reckless feeling is exciting, especially if your days are consumed with flossing Sweetgreen out of your teeth as you rot behind a computer screen. Brighton Beach is exhilarating, and only a train ride away! Depending on the restaurant, you can still smoke indoors after a particular hour, the cuticleless women can magically walk in the highest heels you’ve ever seen, babushkas marinate on the boardwalk benches, and the men profess their love to you. Brighton Beach operates according to its own rules without American niceties. A perpetual drunkness that cloaks the area. A loneliness. A liveliness.
The environment makes for good fodder, and Baker knows that. Except, this dark fantasy-by-way-of-the-B train was poorly executed. It’s a trick! The film didn’t go further than exposing the oddities of a non-Western culture. I never got to know the characters. Sure, I liked the actress who played Ani. The Russian oligarch’s kid was cute. The Armenian thug-priest was great. And yet, for me, there was a disconnect permeating throughout the film that felt like a shortcut. In many ways, the most interesting thing about the film is the setting, which isn’t enough. Yes, Ani is emotionally orphaned because her only commodity is her body. There’s a power struggle between having money and not having money. That throughline, which has been stated by others before, is compelling if not completely exhausted by shows like White Lotus and Succession. These lofty themes are nice and all, but ultimately, the Anora story was flat, with no twists and turns and a less-than-exhilarating second act. Depth was replaced with wealth-porn and lap dances. Ani is little more than a tight-abbed mouthful of profanities with an impressive right hook. The plot and characters are aimless and lean on screaming episodes, reckless driving, broken noses, and crashing restaurant kitchens. A gut-wrenching story is lost because the film depends on this Brooklyn world and its proverbial curse words—and that’s all it really is.
There’s nothing beyond the superficial dependence on the weirdness of the Brighton Beach ecosystem, the Russian language, brusque interactions, and the nonchalant violence. I’m not surprised. In the United States, we are starved for culture, so we rabidly consume subcultures or small communities, only to spit them out but not thoughtfully explore them in art, film, or writing. The characters have little to say, and their success depends on how much the West can be entertained by cultural peculiarities that it deems exotic. The result is voyeuristic and cheap. It’s like playing bad dress-up—essence in drag.
The film felt like an Uncut Gems rip-off, and I loved the Safdie brother’s film. I adored the McMansion-sodden shots. I was in love with the rude Bukharian diamond dealers. I wanted to get a drink with Howie’s tender and frustrated wife. Then, I wanted to slip my hands under Howie’s sweaty silk shirt and give him a lap dance of my own. Uncut Gems unearthed a whole new world for many people, as Anora did. But there was a solid plot in Uncut Gems, great dialogue, and layered characters. We were fully let into the foreign, demented world of the Diamond District. Yes, Anora was a film that delved into a relatively untapped community and exposed its idiosyncrasies, which was entertaining at times, but that’s as far as it went.