Films on Sunday: Anora & Flow
Two Academy Award winners: one a spoiled fairy tale about a stripper and a bratty Russian boy; the other, best animated feature from Latvia, charmed storytelling without words but plenty of flow.
Anora (2024, Hulu)
Here is first venture into 2025 Academy Awards territory. It doesn’t seem likely that this little plumb Anora was best movie of the year at the March 2 awards ceremony, or that its star, Mikey Madison, would have beaten the favored Demi Moore for best actress but that’s what happened; and the movie is a juicy ride and a more subtle story than the sex romp first appears. (Also, Yura Borisov was up for best actor in a supporting role. Russian nominees are a rarity.)
The acting and characters are terrific. The plot has a satisfying arc of beginning, middle, and impactful end, with something to say about the painful poverty of transactional relationships with just a trifle (a very small trifle) of an uplift to ease its hapless conclusion. The chief setting, a mansion and humbler environs of Brooklyn’s Russian-American Brighton Beach, sets you in this completely authentic place. There’s even a shadow of a political point, in a movie that is not about politics but about rich Russians and strippers.
Our star, Mikey Madison, is young stripper-cum sex worker, Ani, short for Anora, employed at a Manhattan club. We meet her gyrating through several customers and jostling with co-workers and bosses until she lands in the lap of Ivan (Vanya), the adorable, hyper, immature, young son of a Russian oligarch and supposed student who loves the clubs and playing video games above all else (Mark Eydelshteyn). The two giggle and flirt their way through several encounters and have a lot of sex. Soon she is his girlfriend. He acts the real life prince, proposing and buying her a large ring. They marry in Las Vegas. These two seem made for each other, appearing to be compatible in temperament, in their transactional approach to their relationship. Although Vanya tells Ani he will have to return to Russia to work for his father.
His parents soon learn of the liaison and Vanya’s father assigns his U.S. goons to break them up, get rid of Ani. Easier said than done. Ani seems genuinely caring of her handsome brat of a husband and entranced by his world of luxury and play. Once his parents arrive in the U.S. and their surrogates are involved, however, Vanya goes into cowed mode; he runs away, disappears. The fairy tale has begun to unravel. Only when we see that Igor, the youngest of the Russian goons, is sympathetic to Ani and kind to her, do we feel a bit of possibility she may gain insight into her life of transactions. Genuine kindness is not behavior she knows how to cope with. Her tears in the final moments give her and us hope.
As for the political point glanced by earlier, it is familiarity with the goon factor we associate with Putin and his minions — abductions, murders, invasions, unfathomable violence. Putinism/Trumpism arouse feelings of impotence in more than half of us, accustomed as we are to doing right by others at work and study. Now like Anora, we are jolted out of oblivion —furious, grief-struck, and faced with the imperative that something different must happen. What that is isn’t clear yet, but Anora is not the worst place to begin to fathom the fight ahead to protect what is kind and right in our universe.
Note: For more Mikey Madison, see her in 2015-2022 series called Better Things, streaming on Hulu. Yura Borisov is a star in Russia; both he and Mark Eydelshteyn have credits to view on line.
Flow (2024, MAX)
Winner of the March 2 Academy Award for best animated feature (and a winner of trophies around the world), Flow is both real and magic — balancing facts we know with fantasy. Latvian writer/director Gints Zilbalodis has led us through a forest and a bible-sized flood in which its critters act like critters until the disaster unfolds and they begin to work together (more or less) for their own well being and survival. Here is a story told by creatures that is a metaphor for the journey humans face jockeying between individual striving and the support of community — a seesaw we teeter on every day.
Flow is both the water that drives our critters to change their behavior (melting ice caps cause bodies of water to rise, wiping out old habitats) and the flow of actual change we come to witness in our creature protagonists. They represent the extent we humans must adapt and change to survive a world in crisis, or let’s say, to survive the consequences of global warming in particular.
The central character in this marvelous visual saga is a small amber-eyed, black house cat whose home is swallowed by the rising tide. A busy domestic ring-tailed lemur is a feature player, a very tall secretarybird, a yellow Labrador who is sweet but not too bright, and a slothful capybara (a rotund guinea-pig-like fellow).
Cat is cast adrift as the flood drowns his human home, and with nowhere else to stand, latches on to a small, battered sailboat that floats by in the nick of time. It is occupied by Capybara until others clamber aboard as the boat sails past small earth outcroppings.
There is no dialogue here, the critters bark, mewl, grunt, squeak just like themselves, feeling and sounding like others of their kind — not human-like or cartoony. Yet we understand them. Their ramshackle boat sails past man-made buildings, a city drowned by the rising tide.
A fearsome whale heaves through flooded streets. Our critters adapt by catching and offering food, allowing a persecuted newcomer into their midst, sharing a hand mirror (found in the boat) to stare at oneself; a stab is made at housekeeping via the piling of items into a basket. Conflict arises and dissipates given some urgency to pull together rather than bicker over the small stuff.
As the waters recede and the woods reappear, there is sympathy now for the whale, beached on the forest floor breathing its last and the boat is caught in a tree, but our animals are safe, looking at themselves reflected in a puddle. The world has changed; the group has coalesced through their struggle against threat. And here we are.
Note: Viewers say pets are fascinated and watch Flow from beginning to end with their owners.