On Hoping for the Impossible
The Oscars, Anora, All We Imagine As Light, Acts of Infidelity, David Lynch
Oscar Round-up
I was hoping to do another extended round up of Oscar movies this year, but I have been figuratively underwater with various deadlines while also dealing with a basement that was literally underwater. So, briefly, I thought last year was middling for mainstream-ish movies with artistic aspirations. I enjoyed Conclave and A Complete Unknown, despite being not really my thing. They were well-thought out, had strong performances, and enough interesting ideas to keep me engaged. Dune Part 2 and Wicked Part 1 were both decent blockbusters that made good use of their nauseatingly high budgets. While not the most inventive spectacles, they had more personality than your average superhero flick. Nickel Boys was an ambitious film that, like most experiments, had mixed results. RaMell Ross, the director, has a wonderful eye for images, but couldn’t seem to translate the plot and characters from his source material into something emotional or even legible. The Substance was punishing and mostly unpleasant, though I thought its gore-filled climax was a blast. The Brutalist didn’t work for me, in spite of a handful of pretty good sequences—maybe with more time and money they could have made something that didn’t feel so threadbare, or maybe the script was too full of clunky writing, thin characterization, and narrative incoherence.
Most of my favourite films of 2024 went un/under-nominated. I thought Nosferatu was a great time At The Movies. Sing Sing (which I wrote about here) has my heart. All We Imagine As Light was gorgeous (see below). And my absolute favourite was Challengers (which I wrote about here). Challengers rips—wonderful acting, a killer script, delirious cinematography, and the best score in years. Justice for Challengers!
As for Anora…
Anora (Baker, 2024)
A stripper named Ani falls in love with and marries her client, Vanya, while he’s on an extended vacation in New York. On learning that their boy has taken up with a sex worker, Vanya’s parents, who happen to be Russian oligarchs, dispatch a local fixer to drag the newlyweds to court for an annulment. Vanya, incapable of facing responsibility for his actions, disappears, and the fixer and a few goons scour Brooklyn in search of him. They drag Ani along for the ride as she slowly comes to realize that Vanya is not the prince she hoped he was.
We don’t know much about Ani’s life—we see her working at the club, flirting with and dancing for clients. We glimpse her drab outer-borough apartment. We know she has a sister, and a mom who lives in Miami with a boyfriend. We know Ani is looking for money and fun—we see her gaze in awe at Vanya’s mansion, and thrill at the pleasure of a luxury trip to Vegas with his friends.
The first third of the film is one frenetic, delirious montage of falling in love, which grinds to a halt once the parents and their goons get involved. The film then becomes one long night of exasperated Armenian men and one brooding Russian arguing, freaking out, and battling with the ferocious Ani. Though Vanya never appears as anything more than a rich, priapic bro, the filmmaking at the beginning is seductive enough to make us feel that Ani might have really hit the jackpot. It’s not like she has much going on otherwise—no responsibility and no ambition beyond getting money. And it’s not hard to see why Vanya would like Ani, who is beautiful, fun, and treats sex with the ease of someone who does it for a living. When Vanya ultimately reveals himself to be an immature doofus living on pure juvenile instinct, Ani is heartbroken.
I felt some sympathy for Ani, who like many people today is looking for that One Weird Trick that will whisk her away from the drudgery of life and place her in the pantheon of walking gods our unequal society constantly waves in our faces. Cinderella is one of the world’s most enduring stories; versions of it appear across cultures. It’s perhaps never been so relevant.
The movie’s real romance slowly sneaks up on the audience, as the Russian goon reveals a decency that Vanya completely lacks. While I enjoyed this turn I didn’t feel particularly bought into it. Sean Baker (Tangerine, The Florida Project, Red Rocket) is a resourceful filmmaker with a longstanding interest in sex work and the emotional lives of the people who do it. I think this attention is in many ways laudable. Sex workers experience stigmatization and danger unequalled in the world of work. They deserve to have their stories told as much as the cops, doctors, lawyers, mobsters, and wealthy suburbanite families our media environment has spent decades chronicling in great detail. Baker is not particularly sentimental about his subjects—these independent contractors on the margins of the labour force are not uniquely clever or goodhearted, nor are their dramas generally all that dramatic. Anora, given the billions of dollars at stake, is probably Baker’s most entertaining film. It has spirited performances and solid laughs. But the shallowness of the characters is ultimately a barrier to insight that no amount of talented filmmaking can overcome. One might think that sex worker’s lives are interesting, given their closeness to the most intimate parts of the human experience. But Baker’s most notable accomplishment over five films is to show that this interest has its limits.
Critics have favourably compared Anora to the screwball romantic comedies of the golden age of Hollywood. One key difference is that those screwball comedies were full of wit and charm, and their characters had off-the-charts chemistry. The audience in a screwball comedy wants nothing more than to see the characters get together. Most importantly, those movies were about adults. Anora’s characters, for all their adult behaviour, have the emotional maturity of teenagers. It’s hard to feel invested in a romance between such half-formed things.
All We Imagine As Light (Kapadia, 2024)
One of the most beautiful sights on this earth, in my opinion, is a dense city lit up at night. It is here where the miracle of modern life seems most alive to me. All We Imagine As Light is full of dreamy shots of Mumbai after dark—the market stalls, crowded streets, commuter trains and buses, and one spectacular parade. Disembodied snippets of Mumbai transplants speaking a variety of languages are occasionally heard over shots of these urban landscapes, reflecting the immense city that absorbs people from all over the subcontinent. The daytime shots, meanwhile, are full of rain or overcast skies.
This is probably the best looking movie that came out last year. Directed by Payal Kapadia, making her fiction feature debut, it was produced by an international cabal from India, France, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Italy—in other words, outside of the commercial Indian system you might know from popular blockbusters playing at suburban multiplexes across North America. Stylistically we’re in the territory of realism, recognizable from any number of quiet indie films.
The story is simple. Two women live and work together as nurses at a hospital. Prabha, a restrained but generous woman is married to a man who moved to Germany and subsequently ghosted her. A doctor at her hospital expresses interest in a relationship, but infidelity (even from a ghost) isn’t an option. Her roommate Anu is more of a dreamer, hungry for romance—unfortunately, given her Hindu background, she’s found it with a Muslim man. Meanwhile their friend Parvaty, who is the hospital’s cook, is getting pushed out of her home by rapacious developers. Prabha does what she can to set Parvaty up with a lawyer, but the churn of the city threatens to push her out.
This is more a snapshot of lives in transition than a full-fledged drama, which is not a knock. Its portrayal of big city loneliness is so evocative, the music and streetlight so gorgeous, and the sweetness of its friendships so gentle that I emerged from the theatre with a light buzz.
Acts of Infidelity by Lena Andersson
Ester, a single woman, has an affair with Olof, a married actor. From the beginning Olof is clear that he has no desire to leave his wife, who he insists he loves. Ester cannot make sense of this—why on earth would he spend so much time with her if he didn’t prefer her to his wife? Ester is baffled and unrelentingly hopeful that the affair has an off-ramp to a normal relationship. Years pass, during which they grow ever closer. Throughout Olof remains consistent about one thing: he will never leave his wife. Occasionally, he wonders if spending so much time with him might be bad for Ester’s mental health.
This is a sequel, or continuation, to Andersson’s Wilful Disregard, which I quite enjoyed for its spare style, intelligence, and insight into relationships. Andersson is an author and journalist of renown in her native Sweden. I don’t know much else about her and little information is available in English, but these books of hers, rich in the specifics of contemporary Swedish life, definitely feel like they are drawn from experience.
Acts of Infidelity is a book that runs on emotional incomprehension. Part of the fun of reading it is that it is obvious to the reader that Olof is a dud. He’s rude, indecisive, dishonest, and not even particularly attractive. You want to reach your hands into the pages, grab Ester by the shoulders and shake her out of her stupidity. On the other hand it is the intensity of her wanting that makes her sympathetic. Who among us hasn’t, at some point, sailed a ship into emotionally unavailable waters? Olof is a wonderfully infuriating antagonist. He’s generally dishonest yet, to Ester, completely candid about his priorities. Though he’s hard to like, it’s easy to see where his exasperation about Ester’s hurt feelings comes from—hadn’t he always been crystal clear that she could never be more than a mistress? If she doesn’t like it, why does she keep coming back?
The novel is ultimately one woman’s quest to understand the psychology of someone so unlike herself. Ester is a woman of action and clear wants. She would never dream of acting one way while feeling another. The novel ends, as is typical for Andersson, with an intellectual heft unexpected for such a time-worn story. What is, on a fundamental level, a relationship drama turns into philosophical inquiry on fatalism and ambiguity. The revelation of Olof’s personality is ultimately hard-won, and speaks to an intellect unsatisfied with simple moralizing. Andersson’s books are like emotional mysteries, with Ester as a detective attempting to uncover the obscured truth about human behaviour. These are the kind of mysteries I most enjoy, and I hope we get to spend more time with this half brilliant, half delusional detective.
RIP David Lynch
David Lynch, like Agnes Varda and Werner Herzog, became a bit of a meme in his later years—a visionary artist often reduced to a series of quirks and eccentricities. Lynch lived the art life to its fullest. There’s no use separating his incredible haircuts, button-up shirts, and eating preferences from his paintings, music, and groundbreaking TV and film. While I do cherish his quotes about meditation, cigarettes, iPhones, and befriending dolls, or his insistence on withholding any kind of explanation for his work, at the end of the day what I care most about are the movies and episodes themselves, which are so disturbing, funny, and sincere. Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Mulholland Drive, Eraserhead—there’s nothing like them. He was a model for all artists, in that his work was so fully himself.
