“Anora” helped me see Brighton Beach differently

“I don’t speak Russian, but I understand it.” The line hits me like a punch in the gut as the first act of director Sean Baker’s new film Anora unfolds. It’s a phrase that the titular protagonist Anora (Mikey Madison), a Russian-speaking, Uzbek-American sex worker who prefers to go by the more Americanized nickname Ani, purrs, albeit reluctantly, as her boss at a Manhattan strip club asks her when she meets a new customer know: Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), the twenty-year-old son of a Russian oligarch.

This line sets in motion a modern Cinderella story gone horribly wrong (spoilers ahead): a torrid affair between Ani and Ivan (Vanya for short) involving systems of power, security, love (ultimately) and the Russian diaspora New York goes city.

It’s also a line I know well; I’ve said it more times than I can count.

Like Ani, I grew up on Brighton Beach, the Russian-speaking neighborhood in southern Brooklyn, NY, and the setting for Baker’s film, which opened in theaters on October 18th. And like Ani, I despised absolutely everything about it for a long time. After all, a hometown is a hometown.

Filmed in winter, so much of it Anora is a joyride through various nooks and crannies of this district and its surroundings. After Vanya hires Ani to be his “very horny girlfriend” for a week for $15,000, they spend a short, debauched weekend in Las Vegas and spontaneously get married. Returning to New York and thinking that she has finally “caught her whale,” Ani and Vanya’s marital bliss is interrupted when his parents find out about the union and send his godfather, an Armenian named Toros (Karren Karagulian), Toros’ younger brother Garnik (Vache Tovmasyan) and her henchman, a Russian named Igor (Yuriy Borisov), send to force Vanya and Ani into an annulment. After a brief argument, Vanya runs away, forcing the three men to search for him, with a reluctant Ani in tow.

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Here, Baker presents Brighton Beach in all its glory—not just the vast cultural melting pot once bound together by a shared history of Soviet rule, but also, perhaps more crucially, the unique outsider status that grips first-generation Americans like me.

About 16 miles from Manhattan, Brighton Beach has been a safe haven for immigrants from the former Soviet Union to build a new life in America since the mid-1970s. Among them were my parents, who immigrated to the United States from Odessa, Ukraine, in the early 1990s after the dissolution of the USSR. After a stint in another neighborhood in south Brooklyn, they settled in Brighton Beach when I was in first grade.

Like other first-generation kids, I never felt too comfortable here and there – not quite American, but certainly not Russian. In fact, my Russian is cobbled together from stilted conversations with family (they speak Russian, I often respond in English) and imaginary conversations in my head where I practice what I say in Russian before I open my mouth. I’m not too confident in rolling my Rs, but I try my best.

For most of my childhood I wanted to get out. Especially in winter, when the stormy wind blows on the Atlantic coast and it gets so cold that it breaks your head. Why do people stay here, I asked myself. “Why can’t we just leave,” I grumbled. “The sooner, the faster, the better,” I pleaded with my parents and anyone else who would listen.

It’s funny how one generation’s security can become the next generation’s crushing boredom – a ferocious need to shed the old skin and grow into something more exciting, shinier. This tension is revealed Anora. What Brighton Beach’s Ani thinks and what Baker — who grew up across the river in Summit, New Jersey — thinks about it feel very different: the former can’t wait to escape it, and the latter realizes it undeniable beauty despite its cracks.

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Anora is adrift and anxious – its characters are constantly looking for what’s next, what’s new. Ani has no interest in being called by her full name, nor does she have any interest in staying in Brighton Beach. She doesn’t want to be the stereotype of the neighborhood girl that sticks around. She wants out too, and she’s doing what she has to to get there.

However, Baker has other plans. Despite the hectic pace of the search party, Baker lowers his camera a little to ensure silence. We see it as Ani walks down the boardwalk to Tatiana, the basic Russian restaurant in Brighton Beach, where she and the gang of three believe they will find Vanya. The orange glow of the sun as it sets on the water. The promenade glows in the rays and stretches seemingly forever. The variety of colors on the horizon, even as the troupe rushes out of the restaurant, heads bowed, unable to find their target as gusts of wind batter against them. It’s another dead end and yet the sky behind them bursts with brilliant reds, greens, yellows and blues as night falls. In this way, Brighton Beach can be a merciless show-off, not to mention your feelings.

Maybe that’s the most important thing Anora cemented for me. Sometimes it can be so shocking when someone can see you and your story more clearly or lovingly than you can ever see yourself. It creates a sense of depth that helps make things less two-dimensional. That’s what Baker does for Ani, for Igor (who eventually falls in love with her), and for this little enclave in Brooklyn that is often forgotten, pushed aside, or worse, stereotyped. There were plenty of jokes in the film, but Brighton Beach never felt like a punchline. It felt like it was in control of its own narrative.

Over the years, I’ve started to change my approach to Brighton Beach and turn around to get to know Baker’s side of things a little more. I’m less afraid to use my broken Russian. I, too, am beginning to appreciate the neighborhood in all its winter splendor. When the sky is cloudless and the sun’s rays beat on the calm, rippling waves and make them sparkle. The promenade – a far cry from the hustle and bustle it usually gives off in the summer – is barren, save, of course, for the older Russian ladies bundled up in winter jackets or fur coats (real ones) and swinging their arms in wild circles to get to their feet Exercises in. Manhattan is behind you. The beach is right in front of it. I stopped fighting it.

At the end of AnoraVanja and Ani’s marriage is annulled. Ani is heartbroken and feels powerless. Vanya didn’t seem to care any less. Toros is back in the favor of Vanya’s parents. Igor, who is increasingly falling in love with Ani, tries to take care of her. The natural order was restored; The rich prevail, and the nerd, officially unlucky, is thrown back to where she started.

The last thing we see in the film is Ani, broken by everything she has experienced, sitting in Igor’s car. Ani tries to seduce him and starts having sex with him in the driver’s seat. Igor tries to kiss her. She resists at first, but eventually gives in to her feelings and wails deeply, as if to say that she too has stopped fighting.

I can’t stop thinking about what happens in the moments after the screen goes black. Or at least what will hopefully happen to Ani weeks, months, years later. I hope she finds out what home means to her. I hope that learning more about where she comes from will be less stressful. I hope the silence doesn’t feel like death, but more like a breath of fresh air. I hope the tinsel in her hair continues to sparkle when she twerks, like the sun’s rays hitting the ocean water on a freezing day.

I hope for her. For all of us.