audience member, viewer, voyeur, customer

Looking and Laughing in Anora

Since the beginning of Sean Baker’s directing career, he’s been playing in the mushy middle of a representation binary that current discourse has more or less accepted: dignity vs exploitation. After every film he’s put out since Tangerine, someone I know has raved about his directing, and someone else I know has complained of him infiltrating the community they identify with and extracting an unserious story from it.

The tricky thing with Sean Baker is that he is skillful. He has a poppy sense of humour, kinetic directing ability and a knack for capturing fragments of real-life cadences from his actors and non-actors. I’ve stayed curious about Sean Baker for these things, as well as the other thing: he’s a guy who obviously does not stay in his identity-class lane. So when I went to see Anora, I was carrying the suspicions and admiration of my various peers, along with my own.

Up until Anora, my observations of Baker’s films had stayed at the thematic level. This time, however, I felt compelled to look more closely. Because something was off. At a pivotal moment when Baker totally relies on the audience to buy what he’s selling, I felt the sheen of compassion and soul, which this movie relies on to be loved, reduced to cold technique.

Recall the scene in which Annie’s new Russian scion husband, Vanya, runs away upon hearing that Toros, his dad’s main henchman, is coming for him—abandoning Annie to be manhandled by two lower lackeys. Everything in my heart and gut told me that this scene was tragic: a stripper is being told by aggressive men that her marriage is a sham, that it will be dissolved, that it is too good to be true, that her husband does not love her, that if she’s pregnant they will force her to abort—this after her husband, having fled, gave her no evidence to the contrary. Yet, throughout the whole scene much of the audience was laughing. What was going on?

I didn’t think I’d rewatch Anora, but this scene haunted me. Something here, I suspected, would explain Sean Baker’s dubious magic. The second time, the same thing happened: the audience guffawed while Anora resisted the male violence enacted upon her. But what caused the audience to laugh? The short answer is slapstick comedy. The laughter starts when Vanya runs out of the house with nothing on but his jeans and an unzipped hoodie. Already silly. It is here that Sean Baker has Garnik, the scary-looking henchman, chase after Vanya and slip and fall in the most classic slapstick comedy manner, as if Vanya had left a banana peel there to thwart him. Immediately after this, Annie punches and smacks Igor, to which he answers, like a parody of a comic villain, “impressive.” The slapstick fall starts the laughter, then the camera cuts farther away and has us watch a very choreographed fight where expensive stuff is destroyed, two large men are hurt repeatedly by a small woman and the idea of male violence is caricatured and neutered. But what if the scene hadn’t been played for cheap laughs? How would this story feel?

Re-watching the rest of the movie, I realized that the Vanya hunt is really only the pretext for a story of courtship between Igor and Annie. The visual language cues us to notice and not notice it. Annie’s first look at Igor is a suspicious sidelong glance. The camera cuts to a POV shot of Igor in long lens. He barely can manage eye contact. Annie is observing, surveying, resisting. But once Vanya has decisively fled and the men of the film have failed to be dangerous, Baker takes us back to the safety of wides for Igor to safely court Annie. Over and over again, we see Igor being gallant: he offers Annie a scarf on the Brighton beach pier to keep her neck warm (the same one she was gagged with). He offers her a drink on the plane after an abusive exchange with Vanya’s mother. These moments play out in wider shots, semi-comedic, and show gargoylishly-hooded Igor protecting our heroine, mostly avoiding eye contact. Eventually, his hood comes off, and he is brightly lit in the sunlight outside the private jet—a guardian angel. With semi-subtle visual strategies and coarse humor, Baker’s sleight-of-hand directing reroutes a story of abuse into a romantic comedy.

After Annie has officially been divorced and returned to her original class status, Annie and Igor are in the mansion again, their last night before she must leave. The scene is an ironic parallel of Annie’s marriage to Vanya: sitting on the couch, co-existing. In this scene, though, there is no stripping or sex. It is domestic, and filmed as such. Baker goes into shot-reverse-shot and traditional eyelines, maybe the most visually conventional and power-neutral scene in the whole movie. Perhaps it is her demotion to being Igor’s equal—as he can now look at her directly—that provokes Annie’s irritation. Looking past the lens, Annie tells Igor he has “rape eyes.” Igor doesn’t understand and laughs. In the ensuing exchange, Annie insists that Igor must either be a rapist or a “faggot-ass bitch”—there is no in-between. Igor doesn’t know which one to be, and the scene ends in a stalemate. Perhaps this is Annie’s way of protecting herself. Igor is not simply a guy who could be her neighbor. He is either a threat, or useless to her.

Then, in the last scene of the film, Annie’s way of seeing Igor changes. She realizes he has been seeing her this whole time. After Igor helps carry Annie’s stuff up the stairs, says some nice things, offers her the ring he recovered from Vanya’s family—a symbolic proposal—Annie looks over to him. But she doesn’t look past the camera; she looks right into the lens. Whom does she look at?

Igor’s job requires force, but he doesn't like it. He is forced, so the movie suggests, to submit Annie. He never wanted to. Over and over again, Igor tries to resist his oppressive role while being derided as a gopnik and mostly ignored by his colleagues. Perhaps Igor is oppressed as well. And so as the last man in the film, the only one who hasn’t abandoned her, Igor becomes the object of Annie’s gaze. But in that brief moment, when Annie looks into the camera, she also looks at whoever has been looking through that lens. The cinematographer, the director, the editor, us, the audience. Up until then, we have been watching Annie strip, have sex, get beat up, get humiliated, all from an anonymous, omniscient-coded vantage point. We’ve also watched her fight back, try to maintain her dignity, hold her head up high. A director had all of these actions performed and recorded. When Annie looks into the lens, we are suddenly in direct relation to her, just like Igor; we care for Annie; we would offer her a scarf, a drink, treasure her as best as we can; we do not have rape eyes; we are only obediently playing the role we hold in relation to Sean Baker: audience member, viewer, voyeur, customer.