“Anora” is my favorite film of 2024. It’s brutal, hilarious, alive with a wild kinetic energy that feels like the essence of cinema itself. It’s up for six Oscars, including Best Picture, and deservedly so. While most Hollywood movies don’t care enough about Eastern European characters to even get the names right, the film’s director, Sean Baker, went to the trouble of filling it with authentic native dialogue and casting actual Russian celebrity actors. As a screenwriter who grew up speaking Russian, worked extensively in Moscow before 2022, and rubbed shoulders with some oligarchs (believe me when I tell you that the character Ivan’s mom is a type), I applaud that decision.
And yet, that authenticity is also a quandary for many of its fans, including me. While “Anora” is nothing as silly as “pro-Russian” or “anti-Russian,” its Oscar nominations, especially the Best Supporting Actor one for Yura Borisov, have been touted by some as a national victory in Russia. Which puts me in the unsettling position of being in some truly terrible company in cheering for it.
The film’s success inadvertently mirrors that of Putinism in general right now. On Feb. 18, President Trump posited that Ukraine bore blame for the war; six days later, on the third anniversary of the Russian invasion, the United States sided with the likes of North Korea in voting against a United Nations resolution condemning Russia. And, as Mr. Borisov and Mark Eydelshteyn, two “apolitical” Russian citizens, flank the American actress Mikey Madison at award show after award show, it’s hard not to see that this too promotes a notion of Russia as our complicated but palatable partner. A gray actor, if you will.
I genuinely don’t know how to feel about all of this. I don’t believe in cultural boycotts. I bristle at the idea of punishing artists for their citizenship. It is also undeniable that both Mr. Borisov and Mr. Eydelshteyn do a fantastic job in “Anora”; both Yura’s hangdog thug and Mark’s puppy-on-cocaine nepo baby are absolutely indelible performances.
On the other hand, since the start of the war, hundreds if not thousands of other Russian film and theater actors have found the courage to speak out against President Vladimir Putin of Russia and left the country. Given how tightly the acting profession is tied to one’s command of the language, for most of them the move meant sacrificing their careers in the name of principle. A select few have found occasional employment in the West. Masha Mashkova, the daughter of the iconic leading man Vladimir Mashkov (“Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol”), bravely cut ties not just with her homeland but with her father, one of Mr. Putin’s biggest public supporters; she has since played a cosmonaut on the Apple TV+ series “For All Mankind” and, well, another cosmonaut in last year’s “I.S.S.”
But there are only so many cosmonaut parts to go around. For every Mashkova, hundreds eke out a living on the expatriate circuit with things like poetry readings and one-person shows. Many use the newfound freedom to do things unimaginable back home: the brilliant actor and director Alisa Khazanova, for instance, stars in the English-language play “The Last Word,” which dramatizes final court statements made by Russian political prisoners. After this, going back to Russia would mean a very real risk not just to her career but to her safety.
No such risks exist for Mr. Borisov and Mr. Eydelshteyn, who, thanks to the film’s embrace by the Hollywood establishment, are now heroes back home. (Visit Mr. Borisov’s page on Kinopoisk, Russia’s counterpart to IMDb, and you’ll be greeted with a widget that says “An Oscar for Yura!”). Both have domestic filmographies that brim with genre and art-house stuff, though Mr. Borisov’s does tip into propaganda. He did, for instance, play the title role in 2020’s “Kalashnikov,” a biopic of the rifle inventor initiated and at least partially financed by Rostec, the state defense conglomerate and weapons manufacturer. (How do I know this? A Rostec executive once offered to hire me to write the screenplay for it).
It would be hypocritical and unfair to put the responsibility for denouncing Mr. Putin and his war on actors. Regimes like Mr. Putin’s have ways of controlling their citizens that may not be visible to anyone outside their families.
The quandary, rather, is whether it is wise to engage with the Russian film industry at all. After a stretch of relative independence prior to 2022, it is at this point an entirely Kremlin-controlled machine for promoting ultra-patriarchal, colonialist and neofascist narratives. After the start of the war, most major Hollywood film companies left the Russian market; pirated versions of the biggest Hollywood releases are still sometimes shown (for example, a copy of, say, “Barbie” meant for, say, Kazakhstan might be screened as a free “bonus” to a short that plays before it.) HBO dropped the Serbian Russian actor Milos Bikovic from “White Lotus” after his pro-war views were made public; Netflix buried a Russian adaptation of “Anna Karenina” after it has been shot. (It starred, among others, Mr. Borisov as Levin.)
For the past three years, state media fed the Russian public a steady diet of stories about their culture being “canceled” and disrespected in the West. To go from being effectively frozen out of the 2024 Paris Olympics to the country’s first- Oscar acting nomination since 1978 must have given the propaganda machine quite a whiplash. Better yet, unlike Andrey Zvyagintsev’s “Leviathan,” which earned an Academy nod in 2015 but was seen as libelous back home, “Anora” contains no overt criticism of Russian society (beyond the universal theme of the rich not caring about the little people). That is the outcome Mr. Putin’s soft-power operators have been trying for decades to buy — until it landed in their lap for nothing.
It is no wonder, then, that the film’s success is seen from Moscow as the country’s return to the global stage. Who needs pole-vaulting when you’re winning the culture? Or, in Mr. Borisov’s own words to “Interview” magazine about “Anora” capturing the Palme d’Or, the top award, at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, “A lot of people in Russia were very happy, and congratulated me in the shops, some at gas stations, on the streets … because it is like a win at the Olympic Games.” In Russia, all victories are national.
My guess is that Mr. Baker, too, knows this. After all, “Anora“ is set in 2019. (One clue is a Juul vape pen, which was banned in 2022). Unlike Mr. Baker’s previous film, 2021’s “Red Rocket,” which was strategically set around the 2016 U.S. presidential election, “Anora” doesn’t ground the story in a specific moment but untethers it from one: its plot works only in a world where the war in Ukraine is not an issue, and oligarchs’ private jets zip between Moscow, New York and Las Vegas without worrying too much about sanctions or other restrictions.
Of course, with a Putin-Trump peace deal, that might once again be our world very soon. Sanctions will likely end, and Hollywood blockbusters will return to Russian theaters. And those who sacrificed their homes and careers to avoid associations with a genocidal regime will be made, in retrospect, to look like idealistic fools.
“Red Rocket” was a barbed fable about an amoral striver returning to his hometown and corrupting everyone in sight; I would imagine that it would the six Baker to see the effects of his own work even accidentally sync up with Mr. Trump’s brand of mercenary realpolitik. If one or more of the six nominations for “Anora” turn into a win come Oscar night, I hope that at least some of its time in the spotlight will be spent addressing a simple truth: There is, at this dire moment, no such thing as a neutral actor or an apolitical film — even if they are both also excellent.
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