On Anora (dir. Sean Baker, 2024)
Everyone's reading Anora as a class movie — Cinderella inverted, the Pretty Woman that remembered to be honest about the ending — and this is fine as far as it goes, it's just that the specific material substrate it's sitting on top of is genuinely weirder than "rich guy, poor girl" conveys, and the movie knows it's weirder, which is why the thing works at all.
Start with Brighton Beach. The setting carries weight as setting, and further as a specific diaspora produced by a specific piece of Cold War legislation — Jackson-Vanik, 1974, the Trade Act amendment that tied most-favored-nation status for the USSR to Soviet emigration policy, specifically Jewish emigration, specifically as a Cold War pressure point — and the reason you have a Russian-speaking enclave in Coney Island at all is that when the Soviets finally let Jews leave in waves across the late '70s and then the great flood of the early '90s they largely went to three places, Israel, Germany (don't ask), and the outer-borough margins of a handful of American cities, with NYC getting by far the plurality and Brighton getting the lion's share within NYC because the housing stock was post-war and cheap and nobody with options wanted to live next to a commuter rail stop on the ocean in a neighborhood that had been Jewish once already and gone through a collapse cycle.
That's the primary wave. Then the 1990s brought the secondary wave, which extended beyond specifically Jewish and beyond specifically refugees, taking in the wider post-Soviet outflow of everybody who could get out, ethnic Russians, Armenians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Georgians, Central Asians — and they landed on top of the 1970s wave because that's where the Russian-language infrastructure already was.
Which is where Vanya's whole social world in the movie comes from. The henchmen are local — Brighton, or Rego Park, or somewhere in that orbit. Toros is Armenian. The specific Armenian-from-the-Soviet-Union diaspora occupies a very specific commercial niche in the Russian-American economy, which is a fixer niche, a lubricant niche, a "I know a guy who knows a guy in both countries" niche, and this is the standard sociology of a commercially proficient minority inside a larger linguistic diaspora, same pattern you get with Chiu Chow Chinese in the old Southeast Asian trading networks or Lebanese in West Africa or (sorry) Jews in basically everywhere for most of recorded history. The reason the movie can use these guys as both comic relief and actual threat without it feeling forced is that this is what the job genuinely looks like from the inside — you're a middleman, you're irritated, the young master has made a mess, you have to handle it, and handling it requires both the ability to be menacing and the ability to show up at a Coney Island diner and order food because you're also hungry.
Now, Vanya. Vanya is the part where the reading of the movie as "class movie" needs another layer added, because Vanya sits outside upper-class in any sense an American framework prepares you for. His dad is a Russian oligarch. Russian oligarchs sit at one remove from aristocrats, from dynastic capitalists, from Russian businessmen in the way an American would think of a businessman — they are a specific cohort of men, almost all of them born between roughly 1950 and 1965, who were in the right position (usually in Komsomol or mid-level Soviet industrial management or the early cooperative sector) in the specific five-year window between 1989 and 1994 to lay hands on the newly-privatized Soviet state assets via a sequence of frankly incredible rigged auctions, the most famous being the loans-for-shares scheme of 1995, where the Yeltsin government "borrowed" money from a handful of newly-minted bankers against the collateral of the country's oil, nickel, and aluminum industries, and then of course defaulted, and the bankers got to keep the collateral at pennies on the ruble. This is the origin story of essentially every Russian fortune over a billion dollars. It is extremely recent, and it is extremely political, meaning it is contingent on the continuing grace of whoever happens to be running the Kremlin that decade.
Which means Vanya's family money sits in a structurally different category from, say, a Rockefeller grandkid's money or a Walton grandkid's money. The Rockefeller money is in trusts and foundations and a diversified asset base across four generations of professional management, and it persists regardless of who's in the White House because the relationship between American wealth and American political power is mediated through an enormous apparatus of lawyers and markets and institutional inertia. The oligarch money is one-generation-deep, held in specific assets tied to specific ministries, and can be liquidated by a phone call if the patriarch falls out with the patron. You see this every couple of years when somebody gets defenestrated out of a hotel window in Moscow or poisoned in London or has their company suddenly reclaimed by the state and discovers that their "wealth" was actually a revocable license.
So when the movie has Vanya's parents fly in from Russia and basically repossess him, the surface vibe is "rich people exerting social control over the heir" and the underlying mechanics run closer to "a family office employee being summoned back to the home office because he's making the client look bad and the client is not someone you want looking bad." The parents lack the kind of social-legal power over Vanya that a Gilded Age American family would have had — they can't disinherit him in any meaningful common-law sense, he's a US-present adult, the annulment sits at one remove from a legal question, the whole thing could in principle be fought out in Nevada family court for a year. What they have is the power to turn off the money, and the money flows from a position in the Russian patronage network that only exists if the family stays in good standing, which means they genuinely cannot afford to have a son who has married a Brighton Beach escort and gotten photographed with her in Vegas, because Russian domestic press coverage of that is going to ricochet through Moscow in a specific way and create specific problems with specific people who can, in fact, take the nickel smelter back.
This is what Toros is nervous about, which the movie signals well without ever explaining — his nervousness goes past Galina's wrath as a matriarch — he has professional exposure to this family's ongoing access to its own assets, and a twenty-three-year-old kid ruining that access by doing something stupid in Las Vegas is a live-wire problem in a way it simply doesn't register for, like, an American billionaire's trust-fund son running off with a stripper, which is at most a family-tabloid situation that gets cleaned up by the lawyers in six weeks.
Although it must be said — the Galina scene in the diner works so well because the movie correctly identifies that the terrifying person in the oligarch family is the wife rather than the oligarch. Russian matriarchal authority inside that social class is a real and specific thing, partly because the husbands spend all their time managing their patronage relationships and don't have bandwidth for anything else, partly because the women in that cohort grew up in the late Soviet period when being a woman meant doing literally all the domestic and most of the emotional labor of a household while also holding a full-time job, and came out of it with a specific kind of administrative steel that the Americans in the room consistently underestimate until it's too late. Galina is past anger. Galina has decided what's going to happen. Vanya knows, Toros knows, Anora figures it out about three minutes in.
Anora herself is a parallel case of a recent, unstable, post-Soviet pattern, which is worth lingering on. The specific kind of Russian-speaking Brighton sex worker the movie is depicting — and depicting very precisely, to the point where people who know that world have said it's the most accurate film portrait ever made of it — is itself a product of the 1990s diaspora. The pipeline from the former Soviet Union into the high-end New York escort and strip club scene is a specific thing produced by a specific collapse, same collapse that minted the oligarchs, viewed from the opposite end — on the one end you get the guys who grabbed the smelters, on the other end you get the daughters and granddaughters of people who had middle-class Soviet lives and then suddenly didn't, and for a meaningful subset of those women the available trajectories included going to a country where you could make in a month what your engineer father had made in a year, doing work that was illegal at home and also not exactly respectable at home. The Brighton context matters because Brighton is where the network operates — it's the neighborhood-scale infrastructure of that trade, the contacts, the housing, the clubs, the informal credit system, the whole economy.
The movie is obviously very clear-eyed about this, obviously declining to romanticize it — Baker has been making films about this specific kind of structurally-embedded-but-not-really-discussed American economy for fifteen years, it's basically his only subject (Tangerine, The Florida Project, Red Rocket), he knows what he's looking at. And the thing he's showing you in Anora that goes beyond the earlier films is that the Russian-American margin and the Russian-Russian elite exist in the same postcard-sized world, linked by a specific historical rupture that created both of them, thirty-five years ago. Vanya and Anora could both tell you what a kulich is. Their grandmothers could have been neighbors.
Which is why the marriage idea even occurs to either of them — and at this point the American "class" reading runs up on its limits — because inside the diaspora, Vanya marrying a Brighton girl is a transgression of a different shape from a Gilded Age industrialist's son marrying a chorus girl. It's socially awkward, and the social distance falls well short of the social distance the American class narrative requires. They speak the same language. They have the same cultural reference points. They watch the same variety shows on YouTube. The scandal turns on his parents' specific position vis-à-vis Putinist elite society, with the deep-caste-divide reading sitting outside the actual mechanics — in purely cultural terms they're closer to each other than an Ivy-League kid is to a Flatbush kid, because the Ivy-League kid and the Flatbush kid are separated by three generations of divergent education and media consumption whereas Vanya and Anora are separated by one generation of divergent fortune.
The temporal rhyme, since you can feel it forming, is with the Gilded Age American dynasties' third-generation problem — the one Edith Wharton wrote about, where the grandfather built a fortune in railroads or steel, the son consolidated and married his daughter to a European title, and the grandson was a fundamentally weightless young man with no function, surrounded by people whose job was to manage his weightlessness without letting it become catastrophic. That's Vanya, more or less, just compressed from three generations to one and with Russian institutional specifics instead of American ones. The oligarchs are still in the first generation — they're the ones who did the grabbing — and Vanya is simultaneously the son-who-consolidates AND the grandson-who-dissipates, because the Russian version of the cycle runs faster. The American version had a hundred years of stable legal and market conditions to play out in. The Russian version is working with a thirty-five-year horizon and a patron who can cancel the whole thing by losing an election or getting sick, and everyone in the family knows it, which is why everyone in the family is tenser than an equivalent American family would be.
The henchmen's competence, or rather their specific type of competence, is the other thing worth noticing, because this is also a post-Soviet pattern. They sit outside the mafia-goon Italian-American sense and outside the bodyguard private-security sense — they're fixers, which is a specific profession that exists in systems where the official legal infrastructure is unreliable and the real conflict-resolution work happens through networks of personal relationships backed by ambient credible threat. In the late-Soviet and post-Soviet economy this profession absolutely exploded because basically every commercial transaction above a certain size had to go through some version of it, and the people who learned it in the 1990s then exported their skills along with the rest of the diaspora, so you have a labor market in this service-sector category, based in Brighton, serving clients across the Russian-speaking world. Toros is basically American small business — he has a phone, he has contacts, he does jobs, he gets paid. That he occasionally has to sit on a twenty-three-year-old is just one product line among several.
And then the movie ends where it ends, which is the only honest ending — Anora weeping in a car because Igor, the quiet henchman who's been watching her the whole movie, has given her back her wedding ring in the one attempt at decency he knows how to make, and she can't receive it without it activating something else, so she tries to convert the moment back into a transaction she knows the shape of, and the transaction collapses, and the movie has been careful not to sentimentalize either of them, so it just lets the moment sit there being what it is. Which is the right move, because the moment is two people inside the same post-1991 rupture trying to have a moment of recognition across a mediation they can't see and can't remove, and the mediation is the entire structural apparatus this essay has been describing — the diaspora networks, the oligarch-regime dependency, the fixer economy, the historical specificity of the Brighton neighborhood, all of it pressing down on this particular Chevy Suburban in this particular Brooklyn driveway at this particular moment, and of course she can't just let him hold her, because there's nowhere for either of them to go.
You could make a version of this movie set in 1905 with a Romanov third cousin and a Moldavanka girl in Odessa and it would play almost the same, except the boy would be wearing a different uniform and the goons would be worried about a different Tsar, and the ending would still be them sitting in a carriage unable to touch each other. Which is maybe the point, and maybe it's me doing the parallel thing because the parallel is right there. Anyway.
