Just One Look

On Anora's final scene

“I grew up in LA, but Hollywood always felt so far away,” Mikey Madison said, during her Oscars acceptance speech for Anora. Looking like a little Audrey Hepburn, on stage in her blush pink dress with a huge satin bow.

In Anora, Manhattan feels far from Ani’s New York. When she returns home to Brighton Beach at the end of the movie, away from the downtown clubs and bars she moves through with confidence and ease, we see her falter for the first time.

Outside of the walk-up apartment that she shares with her sister, Ani hooks up with Igor, her assigned bodyguard and one true ally, in the back of his grandmother’s car. While she’s riding him, he goes to kiss her. She flinches, tries to hit him, and sobs. She’s lost the game that she dared to let herself dream of playing — being Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, marrying the affable turned insolent Russian nepo baby, Vanya, at a little white chapel in Las Vegas.

“Are you stupid?” Vanya spits at her, standing in front of his parent’s private jet before they fly back to Vegas to get an annulment. His American vacation is up, he tells her, exasperated, “Of course we are getting a divorce.” Ani stands frozen, realizing that her dream has come crashing down. The house always wins.

I haven’t stopped thinking about Anora since I first saw it, the final scene in particular. There’s a look that Ani gives the camera, in a liminal moment between choosing to stay in the car with Igor or leaving without saying a word, returning to her life Before. On her face, we see her flash through a kaleidoscopic prism of emotion; she feels like a loser, she’s tired and fed up and painfully disappointed in herself for trusting anyone else. There’s a glimmer of recognition here, too, that flits across her eyes and culminates in her crying in Igor’s arms. A look of love, fleeting and unsure — a sense that she can trust one person, in one moment, in this car seat, before it’s all over. Like it never happened.

This look is why I love that Anora gave us the delicious follow-through of fleshing out Igor and Ani’s relationship. Their relationship grows, from side glances and small gestures of kindness, to their eventual hook up and Ani’s tough guy mask slipping through her tears. A love story by Sean Baker, the trailer reads in cursive cherry red as “Dreaming” by Blondie kicks in. The love story is Igor and Ani’s.

Here, I think about the people you meet for a moment in time: a birthday, a night, walking and talking until dawn, who see you more deeply than the people you’ve known for years, and then never again. The sort of fleeting sense of connection that you can only have with a stranger who you feel like you’ve met before.

“It’s like when you’re at a party, and you look at each other from across the room,” Greta Gerwig said. “And you aren’t necessarily talking, or even there together, but you feel their eyes on you, and you know, and they know.”

The complexity of Ani’s final look, and what it reveals about her connection to Igor, reminds me of Intermezzo, when Ivan, the 22 year old chess prodigy, and Margaret, the 36 years old divorcée, first meet:

“They look at one another without speaking. Belonging, it could not be clearer, to the same camp, separate from the rest.”

And the explanation for this: “When he looks at her, when he speaks to her, he is addressing not only the superficial but also the deep concealed parts of her personality.”

The deep concealed parts of Ani’s personality: her vulnerability, her own desire, her childlike dreaming. I — don’t want to live on charity, Blondie sings. Pleasure’s real, or is it fantasy. A Cinderella Story with the magic washed away and then — just one look. In his arms, separate from the rest. Fade to black, a moment in time.