In the era of short videos, literary and artistic films should have humbled themselves and learned from "Anora".
Poster of Anora
Sean Baker, the old fox, holds the traffic code of domineering president literature and turns the "bloody literature award" of the short video era into a spear of class criticism. On the surface, it is a "Cinderella" adventure between a Russian oligarch and a poor Brooklyn stripper. The two practice the eternal fable of "true love breaks class barriers" in the midst of wine and women. In fact, it hides the precise grasp of the narrative logic of the Internet era - using earthy jokes to deconstruct literary films and using clichés to reconstruct love fables.
When the male protagonist threw hundred-dollar bills on the pole dance floor as if they were paper money, "Anora" was destined not to be a 21st century replica of "Pretty Woman".
Stills from Anora
A friend said: "The prince charming in the 90s was someone who could create wealth on his own and didn't have to rely on his family, but the prince in the 21st century is just a cowardly mama's boy?" What a sad downgrade of the overlord. What is slightly more uplifting is the portrayal of the heroine. The Cinderella of the 90s needed the overlord's money packaging and spiritual education to become a "lady", while the stripper in the 21st century "beat up" the oligarch's family. Whether it is impotent rage or street shrew, compared to the prostitute who needs to be saved by the rich, this prostitute's vanity, innocence, superficiality, bravery, and fragility are all real. As the object of desire to be gazed at, Anora cannot become a "lady", but she is a real person.
Audiences who can watch the mashup of "Tiny Times" on Douyin can definitely watch "Anora" seamlessly. Baker is well versed in the traffic rules of the short video era: in the first ten minutes, the male and female protagonists complete a seamless switch from steel pipes to bed sheets, interspersed with scenes of the lower class tearing each other, the mother-in-law and daughter-in-law fighting, and the whole city looking for someone. An art film can make people cut out twenty Douyin clips. What is this called? This is called the self-cultivation of art films in the new era.
But this kind of fragmented collage is by no means mindless. When the second half of the film suddenly cuts from "dominant boss sweet love" to "New York Escape", Baker reveals his true colors - using a skit-style high-energy reversal to deconstruct the narrative of traditional art films. The absurd scene of a four-person group of bodyguards and strippers running wildly on the street is not only a neurotic variation of black comedy, but also a social observation of "1818 Golden Eyes": the capitalists' thugs are busy looking for mama's boys, the gold diggers are planning to ask for compensation, and the audience laughs until their stomachs hurt in the quantum entanglement of "dog blood" and "profound".
Stills from Anora
Sex, luxury houses, fancy clothes, drugs, parties, casinos, and the den of money-spending, the heroine thought she was enjoying the luck of turning from a sparrow into a phoenix, but in fact, she was also "female body mori" in this feast of consumption. Many viewers will think that the film has too many sex scenes, but I personally think that every sex scene in the first half of the film is strengthening the heroine's situation. Her body is the reason why she was chosen by "love" and it is also the foundation of her survival.
Sean Baker knew exactly what he was filming. In every sex scene in the early stage, the camera presentation and the performance of the two people all reflected the situation that the heroine was used as a tool for sexual gratification. And all this paved the way for the last scene of the film: when the heroine sat on the bodyguard's legs to "repay the favor", she was truly forced to face her situation at this moment - except for her body, she had no support, except for sex, she had no resources, and what she had been exposing was not her skin, but her dignity stripped by money. The heroine's "gold digger" personality is essentially a survival strategy for women at the bottom: she used her body as a POS machine and her marriage as a labor contract, but she could never escape the fate of "structural dependence".
The belief in love is collapsing, the narrative of true love is disappearing. What Sean points out is not only the "Jinjiang domineering love", but also the "gold standard" and "inability to love" of an era. What's more, "Anola" has established a direct relationship between the two. In the end, the heroine negotiates the breakup fee with the oligarch's family. You think this is a love transaction, but it is actually a malicious merger and acquisition in the capital market; and the so-called Cinderella's counterattack is nothing but a bubble of temporary workers becoming regular employees. Anyway, you are a seller if you want to make a living - which worker would not be broken by such an entry?
Stills from Anora
In the era of "5 minutes to show you a blockbuster", "Anora" provides a new way to view art films: instead of being eliminated by algorithms with an artistic attitude, it is better to actively embrace the traffic logic of "the most rustic is trendy". When the audience cursed "insulting women" while searching for the same red scarf, and when the film critics ignored the structural oppression criticized by the film while praising the bodyguard and the heroine, this film has already completed the precise killing of the viewing process in the Internet era - "cultural consumption obtains cultural capital and then converts it into commodity consumption".
The magic of Anora is that it is like bubble tea mixed with vodka: the first taste is the cheap saccharin of domineering president literature, and the careful tasting can taste the spiciness of class destiny. A friend said it well, "Trump and Zelensky are both crazy and exposed in the live camera. Shouldn't our movies put down the past nobility and find some new language?" So, Sean Baker's combination of "using vulgarity to attack elegance" and resist with an embrace, how can it not be considered resistance? In the fragmented era, the method of picking up fragmented literature is enough to be a gimmick, and it can be called a guts. Because even the plastic age has its poetry, does profundity no longer exist? Lower the philosopher's proud head, in the vast ocean of perishable things that you may sneer at, filmmakers need to re-observe the world and rebuild the new profundity and new palace of film.
