Big Mistakes
by Rax King
Sean Baker’s Anora is closest in sensibility not to other recent stripper movies like Hustlers and Zola, but to a good old-fashioned fairy tale romance. We get the beautiful protagonist, Ani, a 23-year-old stripper who’s ready for love even if she isn’t looking for it; we get her prince, a young strip club customer named Vanya Zakharov, wealthy, hapless, more or less sweet-tempered. The bad guys—Ani’s icy mother-in-law, Galina; Toros, the Zakharovs’ put-upon Armenian fixer—bully and insult and connive against our romantic heroine, whose primary goal in the narrative, like any good fairy-tale princess, is to marry the prince (well, to stay married to him against his family’s will, in this case). It’s barely a spoiler to say that Ani fails in her goal and is forced to annul her marriage to Vanya. Even before the happy couple emerges triumphant from the Little White Wedding Chapel, whirling and laughing to a euphoric song literally called “Greatest Day,” we know the romance is doomed. Cinderella may have been permitted her happily-ever-after, but Anora knows the story ends a different way when the astronomically wealthy kid marries the girl his domineering mother finds unsuitable, especially after he's known her for only a week.
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