Anora: The BRWC Review. By Christopher Patterson.
Hard to Escape the Pandemonium of this Tedious Bore
Recently, what caught my eye on Hulu was Anora. I watched it once to divergent emotions, but maybe I’ll feel differently revisiting. Right?
Anora never grows from failure. It is a film that does the bare minimum, despite vapid misdirections to prove otherwise. It’s the desperate tale-as-old-as-time. Anora is never subversive; it’s all too reductive. We have seen not-happily-ever-after narratives so repetitively in popular cinema, it’s become the ever-after for a generation. In naively trying to reinvent, Anora gives a fatigued performance.
Sudden and untamed love falling apart is not new or tonic; it’s second-rate because Baker is assiduously hackneyed. If you want to see existent uncontrolled love and where it all goes, read Proust for Gilberte and Albertine (the ‘Sweet Cheat’). In his faulty endeavor to make his stubborn audience forget the torture, he follows it up with ill-decided Gen-Z ‘humor’ that makes one akin to illness.
Conventional is an adequate term to describe Anora’s ‘comedy’. If I had to dead-center it, it’s brilliant un-brilliance: un-timelessness. It’s evident that Anora is attempting to emulate Gen-Z slang as a type of ‘comedy.’ And while yanking our generation’s leg a couple of times can produce a discerning joke here and there, done frequently, with no intuition, gives Anora a vacant and unenviable glow. It’s a trope Sean Baker never learns from. Realism over art defiles the occupation.
Anora in twenty years won’t be studied for its craft, rather for extracting our age. A 90210 to My So-Called Life. For better or for a bounteousness of worse, Anora is the dilemma of an artist too thrusted in the moment to hark back auld lang syne. A man lost in loopholes. What made The Florida Project brilliant and shallow is what made Anora fascinating and popcorn entertainment. The writing is expendable, but the cinematography is a glittering spectacle.
Sean Baker is cinema’s McDonald’s, the Stephen King of film. Quick and easy, those fries initially taste delicious, but past their thirty-minute expiration date, it’s all thoroughly wearying. For it becomes all too apparent where it’s going, so it’s hard not to put the pieces together yourself and bemoan the remaining run time. Anora then relies on its actress to keep the audience going, and sadly, it breaks the vows.
While Mikey Madison provides an accurate, brio performance as a no-nonsense New Yorker, she fails to be Ani. Her performance is a middle-of-the-road view of a stripper as Ani is spurious. She is parallel to a cliché. A for-the-dollar, happy-go-lucky, but born in The Big Apple pole dancer. The few perfections of profundity are scant. Relying too much on Madison’s face to do the talking, Ani is brazenly surface-level. A product of the script; she is to be sad when you suspect, and she perseveres her elementary dignity when you reckon she finally should. But it’s all too forceful to not be registered.
Baker’s gimmicks: banal use of Russian, stripper-Cinderella, will only charm those seeking unsubstantial fluff. Anora‘s use of two languages is acceptable but woefully unimpressive. A rubbish quirk Baker added ostensibly to make his script less stale and diminish remarkable criticism at large, which proves rather his scope misdirected.
The end of Anora is not emotional viewing but staggeringly tolerable. Ani breaks down for a myriad of causes: her shameful profession, no more dream world, loss of dignity by a pitiful Russian family. But whilst the escalation, it is obscure. Igor’s and Ani’s interplay is too hysterically unrealized for my taste. All I see are Dead Souls.
Take a personal craze a decade ago. Funny then, but presently? Anora is 2024’s ‘realistic’ and ‘funny’ romp, but five prospering years later?
Too was Zadie Smith’s elated debut, White Teeth, soaked with its decade. There, Smith was able to construct a definitive young adult novel by deconstructing and lavishing the era. She then relied on the telekinetic power of the pen and moreover the prolific history of the written word to guide her path. It was by bridging the gap she made modern writing. Never was there a page I could detect a relic. Whereas Anora is immature and monotonous in its presentation, “equivalent of a hyperactive, ginger-haired, tap-dancing 10-year-old” (a quote from Smith out of context).
To compare a narrative that in its final moments used the ‘releasing your emotion’ card, look at Tokyo Story, a vastly superior film. Tokyo Story was made for the lasting moments, whereas Anora could be seen with its absence. In avoiding sentimentality, Baker paid a trip to the cold-world, and learned a depthless price. A film cold and uncompromising, causing any possible blemishes to be in spades.
What astounds me is when I hear people speak of Anora as ‘innovative’ or ‘definitive’. If you recently happened to avoid your local cinema, it is an excusable treat. I dare may say this is the Ultima Thule of brookable fast food.
VERDICT
Anora is a passable film. It astounds in zestful segments but irritates the soul on the whole. The potential for this plot, a stripper in love, is unmeasurable. Tragically, the results prove half-measured and can’t stick to the weight of an astonishing synopsis. Gloomily, for Anora, the shoe doesn’t fit.
2/5
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