Anora is a Movie about Marriage
Tara Isabella Burton on the runaway Oscar winner.
The Academy Awards are tonight. Sean Baker’s Anora has been nominated for six Oscars. If you’re part of the ever-dwindling number of people who tune in to the Oscars, or even if you’re not, you’ll be glad you read this new look at the film by novelist and WoC contributor . The film, she argues, is an ode to marriage.
— Santiago Ramos, executive editor
You could make the case that Anora, Sean Baker’s critically-acclaimed anti-Cinderella story, is a movie about exploitation. The protagonist, after all, is a Brighton Beach sex worker.
Her foils are the Russian oligarch parents of her barely post-adolescent client-turned-Vegas-husband, Vanya Zakharov, and, to a lesser extent, the liminal gangsters they employ to enforce order (in this case, convincing the titular Anora — she prefers Ani — to get an annulment from their son). And, to be sure, the arc of the movie bends towards class consciousness: Ani starts out buoyant about her Pretty Woman happy ending — quitting her midtown strip joint and demanding diamonds — only to realize that both her earlier sex work and the implicit exchange of sex within marriage are less formal transactions than they are gambles: economic moves played by necessity in a house that always wins. Certainly, that’s the parallel arc of Vanya’s godparent-cum-enforcer, Toros, the Armenian priest so beleaguered by calls from Vanya’s mother that he skips out on the baby he’s supposed to be baptizing, and of his reluctant muscle men Garnick and Igor, who by the film’s end have more solidarity with Ani than they do with their employer. Ani’s journey — from the henchman-kicking screwball spitfire we find in the film’s more comic first half, to the emotionally-broken woman we see in the film’s final shot — is also an existential one: pluckiness, too, is a virtue reserved for a world in which pluck can get you somewhere good.
But that narrative — resonant though it may be — isn’t all there is to Anora: either the character or the film. Anora’s petulant stubbornness, the heart of what makes her (and it) so watchable, isn’t just rooted in her desire to hold onto her newfound source of wealth, or even to hold onto the man she loves — and barely knows. It’s not even (just) rooted in her desire to stick it to Diamond: her rival at the strip club, who predicted (rightly, it turns out) that Ani would be back at the club in a matter of weeks. What Ani wants is simpler — and far more interesting — than that.
She wants proof that her marriage is real. Even if she isn’t sure what that means.
Legally, of course, we know that Ani and Vanya’s marriage is valid — as valid as any other impulse wedding conducted in a Vegas chapel in the full awareness that one of the parties involved needs a green card. Morally? Who can say? Anora likes Vanya fine, even if his bank balance comprises part of that affection; in any case, people marry for worse reasons. Religiously? Neither Vanya nor Ani appears to have any interest in religion.
Yet, throughout the film, it’s Ani's insistence that she is in a “real” marriage that drives her recalcitrance. “Ivan and I are married,” she repeatedly explains to a flabbergasted Toros. “I’m his wife.” (“I can’t wait to have Ivan’s children,” she digs in her heels. “I’m probably already pregnant.”) She refuses the admittedly paltry amount of money Toros offers her, but she also — at least, until very late in the film — refuses the far more lucrative road of agreeing to end the marriage smoothly in exchange for a significantly larger sum. Vanya is listed in her phone under HUSBAND and that, if Ani has anything to do with it, is where he will stay.
And yet Vanya the man — the boy, really — barely comes into it at all. Ani’s protestations are less about Vanya, the man she supposedly loves, than about the inchoate legitimacy she craves: the affirmation that her marriage, regardless of its circumstances, matters.
It’s telling that what Vanya’s parents (and, by extension, Toros, Garnick, and Igor) are after isn’t a divorce — the dissolution of a marriage — but its annulment: a legal statement that it never existed at all.
Not that Ani knows, exactly, what marriage is supposed to mean — at least, beyond the flashy diamond ring she has Vanya buy her. From the few glimpses we get of their new domestic life before Toros and his men appear, it appears to consist of huddling against Vanya while he plays video games, and asking him to finally meet her parents. But Ani’s certainty that it matters — a certainty that becomes both more fervent and more poignant every time one of its basic foundations is kicked away — drives the film. And, when at last Ani can no longer deny that Vanya is a solipsistic coward, that both he and his parents think of both her and their marriage as a mere burlesque, it’s still the recognition of her marriage as a marriage that she craves above all else.
But what is being recognized, exactly? If Ani is unclear about what her marriage means, it’s not merely because her marriage is an unconventional one. It’s also because Americans, more broadly, aren’t exactly sure what marriage is supposed to be. Less than half of American households contain a married couple, as of 2022 (down from nearly 80 percent in 1949); those Americans that do marry tend to do so later — the median age for marriage is now 30 for men and 28 for women, both about eight years older than it was in 1956. Marriage, furthermore, is often increasingly seen as a “capstone” achievement — something to be considered only after educational, professional, and financial milestones (to say nothing of the funds to pay for a wedding: which costs, on average, $35,000).
So, what is marriage supposed to entail? Is it a sacrament, or a religious rite? Not likely — only a little over a fifth of Americans get married in a house of worship (down from 41 percent in 2009). Is it a commitment for eternity, or, at least, monogamy? Also unlikely. Although divorce rates are slightly down over the past decade or so, almost fifty percent of marriages still end in divorce, and one in nine Americans say they’ve been in at least one polyamorous relationship. If Anora treats her marriage as a fairy-tale ending it is, in part, because marriage itself, in America in 2025, is prone to transfiguration: transforming into a hundred different social conventions and expectations, before vanishing into thin air.
Anora doesn’t just want the trappings of marriage, in other words. She doesn’t just want the social media posts, or the cash, or diamond ring, or the sable fur she throws back in Vanya’s parents’ face. She doesn’t even just want Vanya. She wants a kind of legitimacy — of a real marriage, where she is on Vanya’s phone as WIFE — that no longer exists. The marriage plot is no longer a way out of the role of damsel in distress. In this Anora doesn’t so much resemble Cinderella, or even Pretty Woman’s Vivian, but the original disappointed dreamer, Don Quixote, unable to understand a world no longer — if it ever was — governed by chivalric codes. Anora may be tilting at the Wonder Wheel instead of windmills, but she, no less than Quixote, is defending the honor of an old dispensation.
Ani’s tragedy isn’t just that she doesn’t get what she wants. Worse, it’s that she can’t make anybody understand what she wants, or believe in the reality of what she’s experienced. She’s like the protagonist of a horror film — perpetually disbelieved that the house is haunted after all. If Ani’s illusions are shattered, it’s not merely because marriage is no more or less transactional than sex work. It’s also because marriage, as Ani understands it, no longer exists. If a church doesn’t make you married, if an Elvis impersonator doesn’t make you married, if two people in a chapel, if the law, if a ring — what then?
In the film’s controversially ambivalent final moments, Baker suggests that maybe it’s some combination of the above. In the film’s wrenching final moments, Igor — whom we’ve long noticed pining for her from afar — presents Ani with her own wedding ring, pilfered back from Toros. He’s the only one in the film to treat Ani as a woman wronged — earlier on he infuriates the Zakharov family by suggesting that Vanya might want to apologize for his behavior. You might say that Igor is the only character to recognize Ani’s rights as a wife.
So Igor restores Ani’s wedding ring — and, metonymically, her honor. Touched, she attempts to thank him with sex. He goes along with it, then tries to kiss her.
This, at last, breaks down her defenses, and our last shot of Ani is of her weeping, whether in despair or relief, on his chest. Others have read this ending as depressing: Ani, broken down once again by a patriarchal system. But I found it strangely, maybe anachronistically, touching: the first treatment, in the film, of sex as intimacy, or as a conduit to love. Igor, with his bald head and old-fashioned views of honor, is the only character capable of meeting Ani on the fairy-tale register. And that might be why he’s the only character who can really reach her.
You could even call it a “happily ever after.” Just a man and a woman, who have slowly, organically, been bonding for the past two-and-a-half hours, and a wedding ring.
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