In Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata, the courtesan Violetta sacrifices her own happiness for the sake of her beloved’s family, immortalizing her love through virtuous surrender. Sean Baker’s new film, Anora, attempts a contemporary riff on this old archetype, once again placing a young woman enmeshed in transactional romance at the heart of a doomed liaison. Yet where Violetta’s story resonates with moral complexity and genuine pathos, Anora offers only hollow spectacle, populated by characters who seem neither able nor willing to transcend their basest impulses.
At the center of this inert morality play is Ani (Mikey Madison), whose brash accent and streetwise swagger harken to Marisa Tomei’s comic verve in My Cousin Vinny, though stripped of her character’s underlying warmth. Ani works as a stripper and escort, euphemistically termed “sex worker” by the film’s marketing, and her persona is meant to reflect a no-nonsense, working-class fortitude. Yet unlike Violetta’s layered complexity, Ani’s motivations rarely transcend the transactional. She comes across not as a fully realized protagonist but as a flat composite of coarse gestures and easy archetypes.
The first hour of Anora unspools at a lethargic pace. Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), the sheltered son of a corrupt Russian oligarch, quickly becomes infatuated with Ani, showering her with money in exchange for her intimate company, the foundations for any healthy relationship.
What might have been fertile ground for examining transactional intimacy (a theme more deftly explored, for instance, in the recent season of The White Lotus) is instead a repetitive montage of late-night excess (boisterous clubs, illicit substances, and contrived flirtation), culminating in Ivan’s half-baked marriage proposal, a ploy to remain in America. It is practically an ad for President-elect Donald Trump’s hard-line immigration policies. By the film’s midpoint, little has actually happened beyond this hollow pageantry.
It is only when Ivan’s billionaire parents get wind of his hasty marriage that the plot finally picks up. For whatever reason, Barker decided that powerful and corrupt Russian billionaires would send their son to America to be babysat by Armenians. While Toros (Karren Karagulian) and Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) provide some of the film’s most genuinely funny exchanges, particularly if you understand Armenian and can catch their cultural nuances without relying solely on subtitles, this arrangement feels absurdly unmoored from reality. Russian elites would only ever hire and entrust goons from the Russian mob — unless, of course, they’ve all been otherwise engaged along the Ukrainian front.
In one of the film’s more memorable comic moments, Toros, who is also a priest at a local Armenian church, is summoned mid-baptism by Ivan’s mother, who wields such formidable influence that he abruptly hands off the baby and dashes away.
Scrambling to placate the Russians, the pair chase after the newlywed couple, vying to annul the sham marriage. Unfortunately for Ani, her ostensibly successful husband is spoiled rotten and immature, hiding behind his parent’s wealth and, as a result, unable to stand up to them, given that his entire lifestyle is funded by leeching off their money. In one telling scene, Ani all but snarls when Ivan’s handlers accuse him of marrying a prostitute, a curious moral outrage considering that, not long ago, she demanded $15,000 for a week’s worth of playacting as his paramour.
Much like Ivan, who pretends to be a big shot despite never having worked a day in his life, Ani vies for the respect and dignity of others but does little to earn it. Most vexing is the fact that neither character undergoes any visible growth throughout the film. Ivan remains a spoiled, passive figure, perpetually glued to his vices, while Ani, for all her sarcasm and defiance, never rises above her circumstances or gains meaningful self-awareness.
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At least the 19th-century courtesan in La Traviata has the excuse of being confined to a rigid social structure. Not so much today, where social mobility and economic freedom have largely eliminated such boundaries. The absence of growth in either character leaves their journeys feeling stagnant, rendering the film less a commentary on transformation and more a drawn-out portrait of inertia.
Beneath its artifice, Anora remains a disappointingly hollow experience, stretching thin material over more than two hours in a futile bid for profundity. In La Traviata, Violetta’s constraints, born of class, gender, and era, give shape and urgency to her sacrifice, ensuring that her tragedy resonates through centuries. Ani, by contrast, operates in a world ripe with freedom and possibility, yet she and Ivan never meaningfully evolve. The result is neither truly tragic nor revealing: a contemporary parable that, lacking either redemption or growth, ultimately drifts into mediocrity.
Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog and a computer engineer in Toronto pursuing his MBA.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
