That location is everything turns out to be a truth nearly as relevant to romantic comedies as it is to real estate. If you cannot recall where two principles find each other or rekindle something long dormant, then the rest of the movie probably isn’t worth remembering.
There is nearly nothing forgettable about Sean Baker’s “Anora,” which picked up six Oscar nominations on Thursday, among them best picture and best director, a film virtually unsurpassed in its use of place and architecture to make the thematic arguments at its core.
The best romantic comedies deliver aggressively on geography, so much so that to ask where “Four Weddings and a Funeral” or “Love, Actually” or any Nora Ephron film is set, can seem like wanting to know which of the ancient empires belonged to Caesar. By now, even if you have not seen “Anora,” you have likely heard that it is a Brooklyn love story with Brooklyn drawn well beyond the parameters of bourgeois cliché.
We are many, many subway stops away from open shelving and tastefully patinated kitchen fixtures, away from people falling in love because they both dig Elizabeth Bishop or Wellfleet in the off-season.
Much of the film unfolds in Mill Basin, far from any bookstore or even a subway station, in a 14,000-square-foot house that sits on a point in Jamaica Bay and channels Las Vegas. Occupied by a 21-year-old gamer named Vanya, the aimless son of a Russian oligarch, it sits as a monument to the moral failings of the dubiously rich.
Vanya encounters a stripper named Anora — or Ani — at a club in Hell’s Kitchen and eventually asks her to see him exclusively, a transactional arrangement that suits her because she finds herself as attracted to his endearingly goofy sense of exploration as she is to his cash.
We are in “Pretty Woman” territory but also in a place where the accompanying expectations are skillfully subverted. Ani is animated by a beguiling innocence, just as Julia Roberts’s Beverly Hills sex worker was, but also carries with her an anger, deeply ingrained, from which the relationship with Vanya brings only a short reprieve.
Like other Sean Baker films — “The Florida Project,” “Red Rocket” — “Anora” immerses itself in the indignities experienced on the less-resourced side of the class divide. For a while in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the genre of romantic comedy seemed distinguished by a certain gendered leveling up in the vein of “Pygmalion” and classic Regency fiction — a sweet and intuitively smart (if not Wellseley pedigreed) woman would meet a guy of much higher social standing, and her fortunes would soar both in terms of a fulfilling relationship in which she finds herself as well as the great apartments and country houses that happen to come along with it.
“Pretty Woman” is the one obvious box-office-shattering example; two years before came Mike Nichols’s “Working Girl,” in which Melanie Griffith took the Staten Island Ferry every day to a secretarial job on Wall Street that left her demeaned by a waspish female boss and then redeemed by the love of a kindhearted titan and a shot at showing off her native talent for orchestrating corporate mergers.
Decades earlier, in the 1940s, a similar dynamic took hold in comedies like “Ball of Fire” and “The Lady Eve,” when the culture, getting dragged out of the Great Depression by an aristocratic president, was eager to appreciate the view that the elites were the good guys.
“Anora” calibrates itself to other realities. It shrewdly asks how much mobility — particularly the kind acquired through marriage — is really possible in a place like 21st-century New York or anywhere the wealthy can sequester themselves from the less lucky.
When Ani meets Vanya’s terrible parents right after they land in town by private jet to break up her relationship with their son, she naïvely assumes that they will like her if she tries hard enough, that her polite and mannered way of speaking will make the matter of her profession disqualifying. It is a peculiar aspect of the conversations that have come up around the film that “Anora” is described as a Cinderella story when it is attuned to very different transitions and awakenings, to princely behaviors coming where you might not anticipate them.
“Anora” shifts effortlessly between the keys of mournfulness and farce, exiling the romantic comedy from the place where it has been so comfortable for so long, the whole universe of tasteful, cosmopolitan money. In the 1970s, the philosopher Stanley Cavell coined the phrase “comedies of remarriage” to refer to those Hollywood films of the 1930s and ’40s in which a certain world order is re-established (usually in Connecticut, he joked) when two like minds reunite after a divorce or separation (or the realization that the other person, long-ago shipwrecked and thought to be dead, really isn’t; see “My Favorite Wife”).
“Anora,” a screwball, might belong to a subgenre as yet unnamed — the comedy of repatriation, in which it is neither the very familiar nor the exotic that ultimately compels but the reckoning that brings you back to some vanished part of yourself.
Ani has witnessed the fantasy — the diamonds on demand, the house with a garage that can hold 10 cars. She has been to the ball, but she will leave no glass slipper behind.
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