I Think the Stripper Likes Me

Film: Anora
Format: Streaming video from Hulu Plus on Fire!

My goal was to get through my set of Oscar films by the end of the year and to save the Best Picture winner, Anora, for last. I did save it for last, but circumstances prevented me from getting it watched until tonight. There was a part of me that didn’t really want to watch it (although I was far less enthused about The Apprentice). There are only a couple of ways for this story to go, and really only one interesting one, and on the surface, the characters didn’t appeal to me at all.

To give the elevator pitch, Anora is a far more realistic version of Pretty Woman. Exotic dancer/escort Anora “Ani” Mikheeva (Mikey Madison) dances at a club and for a fee frequently has sex with her clients. One night, a customer named Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn) wants someone who will speak Russian with him, and Anora gets tapped. Vanya is in New York City from Russia alleged for school, but he spends most of his time playing video games and partying. How can he afford this? His father is a Russian oligarch and a billionaire.

Vanya, as it happens, it take with Ani and he pays her for several sexual encounters and then goes the full Pretty Woman route—he offers her $15,000 to be his girlfriend for the week. That week involves a whirlwind trip to Las Vegas. At the end of the trip, Vanya confesses that soon he will have to return to Russia to begin working in the family business, something that he doesn’t want to do. However, if he gets married, he would have a green card and wouldn’t have to leave. And so, Ani and Vanya get married immediately, and Ani gets a huge rock and an expensive fur coat and moves into the mansion that Vanya is living in in New York.

Naturally, this doesn’t set well with Vanya’s parents, particularly his mother (Darya Ekamasova). Vanya’s godfather Toros (Karren Karagulian) is dispatched to rein in the prodigal son while the parents fly over from Russia to take him back, but not until they get the marriage annulled.

If you haven’t seen this yet, you can see from the set up that this really is just a modernized Pretty Woman. The only real difference in the set up is that here, Anora isn’t explicitly a prostitute, but a stripper who dabbles in prostitution on the side. Actually, there is a second difference. In Pretty Woman, a lot of the plot centers around the Pygmalionizing of the Julia Roberts character and there is no such fantasy here. Anora is from the streets, swears a lot, and is happy to get violent when she thinks she is being disrespected. Vanya himself isn’t a billionaire financier. He’s the punk son of a rich man, the sort of person who has never been told no about anything and who deals with trouble by pointing at his father’s bank account.

That might be, at least for me, the biggest stumbling block for Anora as a film I would want to watch a second time. I don’t like these characters that much. Vanya is the sort of kid (and yes, kid—he’s 21) who picks fights with other people and then has his bodyguards to the actual fighting for him. Anora desperately wants to be that person, but doesn’t have the money to do so. In fact, the only character I like is Igor (Yura Borisov, nominated for Best Supporting Actor, and the only one of the six nominations for this film that lost), one of the goons who is sent along to rein in Anora and Vanya and take control of the situation. Igor isn’t that bright. He doesn’t lust for power or money. He’s just trying to do his job and stay out of trouble. He’s sort of like a pit bull in that he could be provoked into attacking, but most of the time, he appears to just want his head patted.

That said, it’s hard to deny that this is a well-made and good movie. The story, despite it being a lot of a retread, can’t help but be compelling. Unless you are born into that kind of wealth (and hey, if you are, I would love to have you as a patron), there’s always that lingering fantasy of finding your way into that sort of filthy lucre, the sort of money that means you never have to think of money ever again. And that’s the world that Anora is living in with Vanya—it’s not just that the dream is coming true, but that she gets to hold it over the other girls at the strip club. It’s that she gets to be the princess for real.

Anora not only grabbed a ton of nominations at the Oscars, it won a bunch of statues. I’ll be looking at these in the coming weeks, of course, and so I don’t want to go into a great deal of detail here. There’s an old idea that men win Oscars for portraying someone physically or mentally handicapped and women win for portraying a hooker with a heart of gold. Anora does nothing to change that reality. Of the awards that this won, the one I most want to talk about is the one I’ll be looking at in a couple of days: Original Screenplay.

Is this the best original screenplay from 2024? Probably not, and what aggravates me about it is that some of this feels like it’s guiding the audience. Anora tells a friend that she wants to go to Disney for her honeymoon with Vanya. Why? So she can be like Cinderella…which is exactly the fantasy that she’s living already. If you needed more evidence that media literacy is dead or dying, there it is.

The truth is that I think I liked this less than I was supposed to. I often struggle with movies and stories where I dislike everyone involved, and aside from poor Igor, that’s definitely the case here.

Why to watch Anora: It won Best Picture for a reason, I would guess.
Why not to watch: These characters are irritating.