Editor’s Note: The following story contains major spoilers for “Anora.”
“Anora” ends with a grand gesture, and a moment of gratitude that curdles into despair and possibly hope. And Sean Baker is here to talk how it was done.
The writer/director’s finale, set inside a car as snow falls on Brighton Beach outside it and windshield wipers lull the audience into a kind of trance until Baker and team drop the hammer, is one of the all-time great movie endings. It’s the sort of shattering cut-to-black that leaves you stuck to your seat, an emotional sendoff to what was heretofore a deceptively screwball comedy about a sex worker and exotic dancer, Ani (Mikey Madison), whose “greatest day” leads to a rock-bottom revelation.
Dispatched Russian henchman Igor (Yura Borisov, the breakout heartthrob of the picture) has carted Ani from Vegas, where she had a whirlwind contract marriage to a party-hopping childish whisp of an oligarch’s son (Mark Eydelshteyn), back to New York. The marriage (“a fraud marriage?” she rasps at one point) is over, and Ani is left with nothing after being stripped of her nuptials by Vanya’s (Eydelshteyn) parents and gravely threatened if she tries to make any noise about it. But Igor, who we’ve seen hanging in the wings of the movie slowly falling in love with Ani as he works to capture but eventually protect her, has saved for Ani the greatest gift: her wedding ring as an emblem of goodwill. And of course, the only way Ani knows how to thank him is with a sexual favor. Then, he tries to kiss her, breaching her barriers against intimacy. She stops, pulls back, and then collapses in his arms sobbing as he holds her. And scene.
The inspiration for the ending came from “Anora’s” key influence, Federico Fellini’s “Nights of Cabiria,” where prostitute Cabiria (Giulietta Masina, Fellini’s own wife) sheds a mascara-stained tear at the film‘s end after yet again being exploited by a would-be lover. Cabiria looks into the camera with a nod, as if to say, “It’s OK, keep laughing, I’ll be fine, I’ll go on.” In Baker’s film, we don’t see Ani’s face in the final shot, leaving her future more ambiguous and for audiences to potentially hope for a romance between Ani and Igor long after the credits. Maybe, but Baker sees it differently. We know at least Ani will be fine.
“I always have the beginning, middle, and end worked out before I start writing. That was a sequence we pretty much had figured out in our heads,” said Baker in an interview with IndieWire with his producers Samantha Quan (also his wife) and Alex Coco.
“I went back and reread the Google Doc we worked off before you went into Final Draft for the script, and it’s the exact same from the very beginning,” Coco said.
“We knew that the snow was going to slowly build and literally keep them basically in like a snowy cave by the end of the scene,” Baker said. Separately, he told IndieWire, “For me, the endings have to have an emotional gut punch. My favorite films have endings that are the most memorable part of those movies… after this long journey, we had to deliver on that end.”
“What we didn’t know is that it would take three days to shoot,” Coco said, with Quan adding they shot in two locations in Brighton Beach (where the cast and crew lived before and during production). Coco continued, “The choreography around that scene was not just the performances. It was also the entire crew around the car trying to keep this intimate-feeling space inside the car where they were just alone. We had two camera moves. We had our production designer [Stephen Phelps] on the hood of the car with a box full of fake snow, dumping it by the window, trying to get it to collect. I’m trying to deal with the police, because we’re going over time, to not kick us out… Everybody held their breath and just prayed for five minutes, like please let everything line up.”
Baker was situated in the car’s backseat with Borisov and Madison, and he said, “this magical moment happened. I don’t know if you remember ‘Nights of Cabiria,’ but in the last shot, she has this single tear. I just remember being in the backseat and leaning over to see if the tears were coming, and [Mikey Madison] does this one single tear, and I was just like, ‘Oh my god, I can’t believe we’re doing this unintentional nod to the film that actually inspired it.”
I see the last scene of “Anora” as an existential breakdown where the only way that Ani can show gratitude is with her body in this way. But the emotional and psychological bender of her journey with Vanya leaves her at an impasse to move forward in her usual mode as a sex worker — one whose job demands she avoids any substantive human connections like the one Igor is perhaps trying to form.
“That’s one way of looking at it. I definitely have a different interpretation. It’s designed in a way that allows for different interpretations,” Baker said. “I do see it more of it being about her and not really something that she’s giving to him but something in which she’s now regaining the power that she lost entirely throughout this journey. We’re playing with different themes, and one of them is consent, and when he then tries to kiss her in that moment, that’s crossing a line for her. It’s like, ‘No, I’m in control of this moment.’”
Baker said that “Mikey and I talked a lot about motivation and intent for that scene, and meaning, and we came up with something ourselves. But we also, in those conversations, said, ‘I don’t think we’re never going to state it ourselves, what we’re feeling.’”
“Everyone seems to have a strong reaction to it regardless of what they think is happening,” Quan said.
Baker is used to divisiveness in general toward his films — which are almost always driven by an empathetic portrait of sex work, including his iPhone-shot, L.A.-set “Tangerine” or the street hustlers of his third feature, “Prince of Broadway.” With his previous film, the toxic-character study “Red Rocket,” he fretted over possible audience esponses to the age gap between the destitute ex-porn star brashly played by Simon Rex and the Lolita-esque teenage counter worker he manipulatively woos, played by Suzanna Son.
“We actually thought [‘Anora’] was going to be more [divisive] — so far, it hasn’t been as divisive as we thought. It’s been peculiar to see that there’s been this acceptance of it,” Baker said. “I even have some haters on Twitter who are like, ‘We still hate Sean, but we like this movie.’ They won’t give me a break. They still hate me!”
Chris O’Falt contributed reporting.
“Anora” is now playing everywhere from Neon.
