Urgency is fairly easy to manufacture in a film—which is, after all, an art form that has historically been partial to time bombs and threats of intergalactic invasion, love interests that wind up tied to train tracks and walking down aisles with losers they don’t want to marry. Though movies with shamelessly engineered stakes often successfully entertain us, they do so by tapping into our adrenaline. This produces a hectic, superficial feeling. Rarely does forestalling an alien attack depend on a character’s unique personality traits (they usually just need to be brave and ripped). What is more difficult—and therefore rare—is a naturally-occurring urgency that arises not out of familiar plot tricks but out of a deep investment in the story’s characters.
Sean Baker’s newest movie, Anora, finds a way to build suspense in a manner that is intense and character-driven. The film is largely a character study of Ani (Mikey Madison), a twenty-three-year-old stripper who accepts a weeklong gig as the girlfriend to Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), the son of a wealthy Russian patriarch. During an impulsive trip to Vegas, they marry in what seems like a union of convenience for both of them: Ani for access to Vanya’s wealth, Vanya for access to Ani’s American citizenship.
The opening scene of Anora makes Ani’s predicament clear. Her work as a stripper is exhausting and repetitive. She can’t keep from sleeping on her late-night subway ride home. Her sister badgers her for forgetting to buy milk. It’s easy to sympathize with Ani’s decision to accept a position as Vanya’s girlfriend for a week. It’s even easier to understand why she would marry him: he has money and she doesn’t, plus they seem to have a good time together. But the evolution of their relationship doesn’t feel urgent. It shouldn’t. Their romance emerges naturally out of what they each want. Vanya gets the companionship of a gorgeous woman patient enough to teach him how to have sex; Ani might have found an escape from her life.
But the movie doesn’t invoke a sense of real urgency, in the manner that most interests me, until Vanya’s family intervenes in his marriage. Though a lot of attention has been paid to Yura Borisov’s impressive performance as Igor, the stoic, kind-hearted henchman, I found myself most drawn to the inner turmoil of Toros (Karren Karagulian), a handler hired by Vanya’s parents to look after their son. The viewer is introduced to Toros in the back of a church, in the midst of a christening, where he’s on the phone trying to reassure Vanya’s mother, Galina, that her son has not married a sex worker. Once he learns that the rumors are, in fact, true, Toros leaves the ceremony to hunt down Vanya and secure an annulment.
Toros is what the novelist Charles Baxter would call a “Captain Happen,” a character who propels the action of a narrative through the outsize force of their will. Iago, who drives Othello toward the eventual murder of Desdemona, is a classic example of this type. Toros, however, is not as malevolent as Iago—and that’s what I find most fascinating about him. Despite learning so little about him as a person, the viewer gains an understanding of Toros through the pressure he puts on Ani to get an annulment and the urgency he brings to his search for Vanya. He is not merely intense; he is desperate. We see this in his repeated phone calls to Galina, in how he scolds Vanya for marrying Ani, in the ultimatums he gives to lawyers and tow-trucks drivers and candy store clerks.
Toros is an interesting figure because his agitation both drives the plot and is worsened by his actions. When the hunt for Vanya brings Toros and crew (Ani, Igor, and Toros’s brother) to the Brighton Beach boardwalk, he foolishly parks in front of a barricade, too impatient to find a parking spot. We’re not surprised to see that the car is being towed when they return. Rather than find a new vehicle, which would have been a predictable and likely compelling impediment to overcome, Toros gets in the driver’s seat and reverses his SUV off the truck. They speed away as the tow truck driver curses them out.
Toros’s impatience is redoubled. But it aligns with the person we’ve been following thus far. This is what’s most important about his character. Yes, his actions propel the story, but they remain grounded in his personality. He simply acts, and his actions, true to his character, organically heighten the stakes.
Part of what makes this narrative intensification work is Karagulian’s acting. He does an excellent job capturing what is most demanding and vulnerable about Toros. The clearest example comes in the second half of the movie, as Toros stands in an airplane hangar waiting for the arrival of Vanya’s parents, who have caught a last-minute flight from Russia. Toros has just learned that the marriage cannot be annulled in New York, because Vanya and Ani were married in Vegas. The camera focuses on his face as the hangar door rises. This moment captures Toros at his most nervous and scared. He adjusts his jacket, fidgeting and steeling himself for the conversation to come. Everything that led up to this—his threats, his shouting, his crimes—were reactions to this fear. It is a vulnerable, vital moment. And it makes Toros’s actions all the more human. Though he would never admit this to himself, he is, like Ani, a laborer, beholden to the whims of his wealthy clients. That he cannot see this—and that the viewer can—is a critical component of the film.
As a director, Baker focuses, above all, on the characters he creates. Even though Anora’s cast aren’t all as convincing as Toros, the film is ultimately concerned with portraying each character’s particular course of action. This method of plot-building tends to create worlds that feel authentic and moving, even when they stray from total realism. Toros’s final scene in the film neatly brings his arc to a close. He assures Ani that she will receive her pay-off money in the morning and allows her to sleep in Vanya’s home one last night. This is a gentler Toros, but one who existed all along. The change in his demeanor doesn’t surprise us. Toros was always just a man performing his job, a man eager to move past his bullying. He is the perfect person, Baker understands, to set the plot in motion and guide it towards its natural end.
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