Anora and My Old Ass
Last night I went to see Anora with Isabelle. She had already seen it through some streaming service on her computer but thought I should see it, too. I wonder why. Was she trying to convey how conflicted it feels to be a young Gen-Z woman? Maybe.
The Oscar-winning movie was not nearly as gritty as I expected, it was just a slightly grimmer update of Pretty Woman and another go-round at exploiting young women’s Cinderella fantasies of sexual power for cinematic allure. Best picture films tend to reflect the zeigeist of the time, so I suppose this is it. There is a return to a sense of women as intriguing sexual playthings, “animals” who still harbour rescue fantasies and have potty mouths but hearts of gold.
Of course, it did illustrate the hustle and burn of sex work and how it corrodes one’s spirit, but it did it by responding to our culture’s hunger for the objectification of women.
One of my favourite cheeky moments in the film is when Anora and the thugs are looking for Ivan and open various doors to the private rooms and we see Trump lounging in the darkness behind a young woman’s sexually prone body. That was a nice dash of subversion in an otherwise fairly flabby chase scene.
Anora is, of course, a product of this Trump time when women are relegated to the sidelines and depicted as having a limited agency. As a character, Anora is hampered by slack language and a lack of self-awareness and autonomy, despite her spit-fire energy. While Mikey Madison makes the most of what she’s given, the character is flimsy.
Why can’t writers create female characters who have more depth, intellect, and understanding? I see this ever day in my young students, so why isn’t this reflected in our cultural expressions? Why aren’t young women writing about it from their perspective? Which takes me to another film I saw this week — My Old Ass.
I watched my My Old Ass on Prime and it was a beautiful, thoughtful, moving memory film about a young woman coming of age in a small Ontario town. It had the heart and emotional power that Anora lacked. It was written and directed by Megan Park and produced by Margot Robbie, among others. Maisy Stella is brilliant as the exuberant young Elliot and Aubrey Plaza is wonderful as her jaded, 39-year-old future self who longs to return to the care-free days of her youth. This film has weight and resonance and that springs from its depiction of real feelings and conflicts, not trumped up, x-rated porn riffs. I want to see real women on the screen, with real conflicts, complexity, and feeling.
