Love, For How Much?

Anora & Love as a Marketplace

Still from Anora (2024)

*Warning: spoilers for Anora (2024)*

Two years ago, I had a falling out with a friend that was years overdue. Meeting as young teenagers, the two of us became embedded in each others’ lives, weaving around the other like vines on a fence, like ivy on a house. It was a typical teenage girl best friendship - filled with many laughs, YouTube binges, and a healthy amount of mischief. And then, as all people do, we changed - in different directions and at different velocities. New characters floated in and out of our respective orbits, new ambitions burgeoned, and a schism of imbalance sprouted in the thick of it all, which grew into a chasm. Many friends I introduced to her were met with disdain, sometimes before exchanging more than two words with them. Expressions of my tastes - the music I liked, my interests in school, my wishes for the future - were scorned or glossed over. Alcohol amplified the flippancy. Naive and eager to maintain the friendship - to try to preserve what we briefly had - I sat on my discomfort and hid parts of myself. She maintained her callousness and I maintained my dishonesty, and it worked great. I became a smooth sounding board - free of a personality of my own. I was a source of validation, a mirror to refract her ugly parts into more savory interpretations.

When she moved to a new city, I was able to breathe a bit more but she maintained her reign from afar - and I let her. I think she probably imagined me as an inanimate doll, sitting at my desk and engaging in no activity other than waiting for her texts. And I gladly played that part, shrinking and shrinking until I was as one-dimensional as a piece of paper. I traveled out of the country, I began college, I started new jobs and internships. Any time any of that was brought up, the subject was changed quickly. I stopped saying anything about myself and she never asked again.

After graduating, I told her I was moving to New York with my boyfriend - a long-time dream city of mine. I knew that would be the last straw - her doll would be breaking free. She got angry and told me she couldn’t speak to me any longer. I was sad for a little bit. And then I took a very full inhale and found myself very fine.

Two years later, I awoke one morning to a string of text messages sent the previous night. Apologies, exclamations of regret, a desire to speak again. And importantly, several declarations of love. I love you. I hope you know how much I love you. I took a day to respond, assuming the messages were sent in a drunken bit of passion, wanting to offer space for a sober follow-up, but that never came. Thank you, I appreciate it, I hope you’re well. No reply. Briefly resuscitated, then back to dead.

Time untangles even the tightest of knots. Frenemies inevitably dance together at their acquaintances’ weddings, water deep and murky under the bridge. But love - love is the confusing part. Where does the love go, if anywhere? And what even is it? Is it that fleeting feeling of happiness that washes over you when reminiscing? Or is it a feeling of security? The urge to cook a good meal for someone? To surprise them with their favorite treat? When you watch a good movie in the theater and drag the person to watch it with you again the next day, because experiencing it alone is not enough, you also need to experience it with them. Sending pictures of flowers, sitting in the car in silence, listening carefully.

Love is all those things, and it also might be a weapon. A shield. A justification for the craziest of behaviors - cross-country moves, kidney transplants, lifting cars off people. Well, I love him/her/them is one of the simplest plot devices in life. The most airtight of logic crumbles under pure sentiment. Love is a wool blanket to throw over the most unbridled of flames. It’s a reason to act on feeling and without much reason. The rationale behind unconditional absolution. I love you so all is forgiven. I think that’s part of why we all want it so badly - it’s a parachute. A fire extinguisher. A trap door.

Mikey Madison as Anora Mikheeva in Anora (2024)

I recently watched Sean Baker’s Anora (2024) twice in the same week. Both times there were few empty seats in the theater, eruptions of laughter, and air-thickening tension - they were some of the more enjoyable movie-going experiences I’ve had recently. The movie follows Anora Mikheeva, who goes by Ani - a Brooklynite stripper working at an upscale Manhattan club. She quickly becomes intertwined with young Ivan “Vanya” Zakharov, the immature son of a wealthy Russian mogul/oligarch-type. After hiring Ani for sex several times outside the club, Vanya offers to pay her $15,000 to be his girlfriend for the week - to be exclusive with him. Ani agrees and the two spend a whirlwind of a week together - running around Brighton Beach with Vanya’s friends and flying to Vegas at the drop of a hat to party. There is clear chemistry between the two - an easy flirtation hums between them, Vanya entranced by Ani’s physicality, his silliness and inexperience endearing him to her. They are like two kids in a candy store - or two kids with an egregious sum of money and few responsibilities.

As their fairytale week winds to a close, Vanya confesses he has to return to Russia to work for his father - unless, of course, he marries an American and becomes a U.S. citizen. He hastily proposes to Ani, who is skeptical at first but charmed by his eagerness (“I think we would have a great time even if I didn’t have money,” he tells her). The two get married in Vegas, Ani quits her job at the strip club, and the lovers spend another blissful week together - montages of sex, shopping, and feeding each other Chinese food out of takeout boxes ensue. But word eventually gets back to Vanya’s family who insists that the union is annulled. Vanya flees his home without Ani - spurring a wild goose chase and unlikely teamwork between Ani and Vanya’s Armenian/Russian handlers.

Ani insists that Vanya won’t want to annul the marriage because the two of them are in genuine love. But when they finally find Vanya - getting a lap dance at the strip club where they met - he is intoxicated and indifferent. After a scolding from his parents, he and Ani board a private jet to get the marriage annulled in Nevada. Ani is distressed, she begs Vanya to do something, to stop them from getting on the plane. Vanya tells her they have to get on the plane and that they obviously have to get a divorce. There’s a beat of silence between the two, the light dimming in Ani’s eyes as she realizes that the love between them wasn’t mutual after all and that this dream-like life she glimpsed will no longer be hers. Vanya thanks her for making his last trip to America so much fun.

Much of the criticism I’ve read about Anora surprisingly centers on Ani and Vanya’s lack of chemistry - many critics claim to not understand why Ani loved Vanya so much, why she was so insistent that they stay married even after he ran away without her. In my eyes, this criticism rings a bit shallow - quick and hot infatuation can strike like lightning, easily masquerading itself as an instant kind of love. This critique ignores the very real delusions people craft - consciously and unconsciously - about romance for their own self-interests - the ways they scramble to cling onto a rope that’s so clearly slipping out of their grasp, or perhaps a rope that was never there at all. People go to great mental and physical lengths to convince themselves and their partners that they’re in love - or still in love - because love is one of the most powerful safeguards - it’s insurance, protecting its keepers from loneliness, grief, and general instability. In Anora, the theme of love being a protector - a source of power - is made explicit by conflating it with the other powerful safeguard humans can possess: money.

If Vanya were to love Ani, it would offer her more than just mutual passion and compatibility - it would also give her financial stability and the chance to leave her precarious job. Ani clearly believes in the capacity of love to transform, even alluding to her infatuation with “Cinderella” when discussing her dreams of a Disney World honeymoon. To Ani, love - the real kind and the kind that’s performed and sold - represents more than just a union - it’s a kind of escape hatch. And how convenient would it be if that escape hatch came from a mutual, easy attraction? Incidentally, she throws herself into loving Vanya. But to Vanya, “love” is just another part of the service - another transient thrill that comes easily to the son of a billionaire. Another kind of currency.

And I supposed that’s the problem with both parties in the end. Love is not a currency. When requited, love doesn’t require transaction. Sacrifices are made out of feeling, not out of a need to balance the scales. Love isn’t the sum of a series of exchanges, it’s a knitted fabric. The tits and tats are muddled over time and the parties are fine with that. I love you, so I require this in exchange is a paradox (within reason). In the case of Anora and Vanya, love is conceived as a marketplace, when it should be an orchestra. So it fizzles.

Which brings me back to my estranged friend’s confessional - and why it made my stomach turn. A tumbling out of words, like clowns from a tiny car. The words are all there and in the right sequence, but they’re written like a kind of spell. An enchantation. I love you spoken like Abracadabra. Like a pleading Pleaseee, after a child asks for ice cream. I love you, so respond to me. And so I did. And then nothing. The exchange done and dusted. Another good or service exchanged for a currency. Love is not a marketplace.

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