Anora & The Art Of Disagreeing

Art creates healthy discussion - we need to preserve that

Mar 27, 2025

Today we hear from fellow cinephile, Substacker and photographer

who has kindly offered up a somewhat scathing review of the Academy Award Winning film on everyones lips, Anora.

This rockstar shift is something I might explore and do more of on Substack in a bid to platform other writers and their views on various topics. After all it’s this type of differing opinion on art that makes art worthwhile, interesting and exciting.

I’ll let you read this first and then i’ll follow up with my thoughts on the film in an attempt to show how two people who usually have quite similar taste, strongly disagree on an entire nearly 3 hour film.

Did this end the online friendship we have cultivated over the last few years?

No.

Why should it? Well, I think that we have gotten really good at creating spaces online where our thoughts, feelings and ethics are echoed back to us and it’s narrowed our viewpoints and also damaged our ability to see the layered nuance in well, life itself.

Art is a way to express how we feel about the world and if we immediately shut off different viewpoints, whether that be from the artist themselves or the critic who shares an opinion, then we shut ourselves off to the lessons and insights that can be attained within them.

How you treat someone you disagree with says so much about you as a person

I’ve been thinking a lot about this statement lately and it’s helped me to maintain my composure and also not throw the baby out with the bathwater if a facet of someone or something isn’t totally in line with me. I mean it’s so boring if we all think the same, vote the same, live our lives the same and create the same type of work. Right?

I want a cross section of people to make art and I want to hear from a cross section of people who enjoy it too.

So let’s hear from Mr

Tim Carter

and how Anora for him, was frustrating to say the least…

Pretty Woman Gone Wrong by Tim Carter

I really wanted to like Anora. The trailer looked great. I’ve learned to ignore the oscars, but Anora’s win really piqued my interest. Which is maybe why I was so infuriated while watching it. It was the cinematic equivalent of nails on a chalk board for two and a half hours.

Anora was directed by Sean Baker, and stars Mikey Madison as a sex worker named Ani, who meets an immature yet wealthy doofus named Vanya, played by Mark Eydelshteyn. He hires her to be his girlfriend for a week, at the end of which he impulsively proposes to her. They get married in Vegas and all hell breaks loose when his Russian oligarch parents discover the marriage and sic their goons on the couple in order to force an annulment.

The movie is like a really ugly and chaotic version of Pretty Woman. Instead of the fairytale where love transforms the wealthy cad, Vanya runs out on Ani at the first sign of trouble, and we spend the next hour and a half trying to find him. I’m all for subverting genre conventions and twisting fairytales to tell a new story, but this film is never clear on what it wants to say about fairytales.

Ani is bullied and dragged all over town by three men who work for Vanya’s parents named Toros, Garnik, and Igor, played by Karren Karagulien, Vache Tovmasyan, and Yura Borisov respectively. This quartet tries to track Vanya by yelling at every person they encounter and at each other. This section of the film is where the film completely lost me.

All of this screaming adds nothing but noise to the movie. I was taught in film school that good dialogue should accomplish three things, reveal character, further the plot, and express theme. The best dialogue does all three at once. Good dialogue does two of them at once. Average dialogue does one of them. The dialogue here does none of them. It’s just screaming. It’s just filling the soundtrack with noise and dissonance.

Beyond the shouting, I hated this sequence because it has such a slow pace that it just drags on forever. It’s not a constant ratcheting up of tension like the films of the Safdie brothers. It’s just a meandering through mildly chaotic events. It’s also not shot through Ani’s point of view. It takes on Toros’ point of view. He’s the one trying to find Vanya and directing the action. Ani is just along for the ride and becomes passive for the whole second act of the film. If the idea is to put us in

her shoes during this nightmarish journey then we should be in her point of view.

Ostensibly this movie is a comedic drama, but I don’t know where the laughs were supposed to come from. Absurd things happen, but they aren’t funny and they don’t build to comedic crescendoes. They just happen and move on to the next vignette. None of the comedic beats were shot like comedic moments. The camera is never used to emphasize the comedy. The dialogue isn’t funny. Every moment is pitched to eleven so there’s no variety or contrast to create humor.

My biggest issue with the film is what its conclusions are. After getting dragged along on a two and half hour excursion, I was hoping that the movie would have something meaningful to say that would justify all the screaming, but the conclusions are murky at best.

If we view the central relationship as Ani and Vanya, then the movie is about a poor person being used and abused by the wealthy around her. If the central relationship is between Ani and Igor, who is the kindly thug who seems to see Ani’s humanity then there are two conclusions that could be drawn. Either it’s about a woman finding someone who cares about her, or its about yet another man who tries to force her to do what he wants and strip away her autonomy. Sadly I think its the latter interpretation. That feels the most true based on the preceding two and a half hours.

Also if the central relationship is Ani and Vanya, then they only spend thirty minutes together out of a two and a half hour movie. The same goes for Ani and Igor. They share about twenty minutes of screen time. Why take almost three hours to tell thirty minutes of story. It’s inefficient filmmaking.

I will say the performances are all very naturalistic and believable. I like Mikey Madison in particular playing the sharp edges and ferocity of a woman who always keeps her guard up until this one time she doesn’t. I have enjoyed thinking about this movie a lot, more than I enjoyed watching it. It touches on a lot of themes and ideas that have been fun to talk about and discuss. I like the cinematography. I love the moments when the movie stops shouting and lets its characters breathe.

All in all I still didn’t like the movie. I found it frustrating and thematically confused. Too much and not enough. I understand I’m in the minority here, but it’s just not for me.

Lucy’s Sort Of Review

I went into Anora extremely curious and ready for an onslaught of great visuals (it’s shot on film) and a lacking story paired with perplexed feelings on it’s best picture award.

I came out of Anora extremely moved and ready for many long conversations about it’s various choices, themes and possible messages, and of course, the end scene to end all end scenes!

I never thought I would have my love for a movie hinge so heavily on the final few minutes but this one just had me. It felt like we had waited the whole 2 and half hours for this and for me it sealed the deal.

The most interesting thing about Anora is the social conversation around her character, her line of work, her intentions marrying this rich guy and then her quick demise and extreme downfall as we move through the story.

To me good art or art worth making, creates a divide in some way (hopefully in a healthy way or a constructive way) it incites people to talk about the work, to unpack and compare notes. It brings about strong emotions either for or against the work.

My worst fear is to create something so average or forgettable no one can even be bothered to hate it. Anora illicites a strong response in so many of us and that’s part of why I loved it.

Sean Baker was bold in his vision and choices and that really came through. It’s something I respect greatly. It’s even better when it pays off so much that you win multiple awards all whilst being an indie darling who didn’t need to rethink his creative vision or spoon feed anything to the masses to get the awards. Bravo!

Anora is a triumph for the weird and wonderful and it’s a sign of whats to come in the world of cinema but maybe also in the world?

Anora shows us that there is more of a market for less conventional art forms and that we are all fatigued with green screen superhero movies with tonnes of special effects, lazy cinematography and hollow storylines that don’t show the complexities of life and the people navigating it today.

My review isn’t a review of the movie itself at all, but rather a prediction for the future and a strong urge to encourage you to watch the film and think critically about it’s message, characters, creative choices and it’s winning place at the recent awards.

Art exists so we can make sense of ourselves and the world around us and it’s why we have brains and thoughts beyond eating, sleeping, mating and staying alive. We have evolved into these creatures that can express our ideas and thoughts through various mediums and use that to have conversations again and again about life and how we get through it.

For me Anora was a tragic story of survival. It touched on many aspects of ego, limiting beliefs, the fallacy that money will afford you freedom and the inherent judgement that will likely always come when a woman engages in the line of work Anora does.

Seeing Sean Baker tell these stories of the people living on the outskirts of life brings light to pockets of our society that we otherwise might not be privy to. This brings me back to my main point here, which is not to decipher whether or not Anora was a “good” or “bad” film or deserved to win best picture, but rather that we as a society need an open discourse around all the stories we have to share and we need to give them the respect they deserve without letting our bias and peronsal beliefs get in the way.

Our world has moved from one spectrum to the other and we’ve swung so far now that it’s near impossible to have a real honest opinion about anything for fear of being labelled this or that.

My hope for the future is that we hear and see more conversations where people disagree but can still maintain their composure and just get the fuck over it.

You better be watching Anora tonight if you haven’t seen it already. Already seen it?Well if you’ve had any amount of thought on it ranging from camp Tim Carter or camp Lucy Lumen, all is welcome and all is valid in the comments section below.

Love Lucy

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