Lands of Contrast
Anora and No Other Land
Watching
Anora (2024)
Anora holds the distinction of being the first Sean Baker movie I’ve actually liked; there’s a first time for everything in this line of business. Anora/“Ani” (Mikey Madison) is a young woman who lives in Brooklyn and works at a strip club. Besides that, we know hardly anything else about her—we’re told there’s a mom in Miami, a grandmother who only spoke Russian, and that’s about it.1 Whenever a Slav wanders into the club looking for a girl who can talk Russian to him, Ani’s on deck to keep him entertained in her rusty second language. One such customer is Ivan/“Vanya”/“Vanka”/“Vanechka”/etc. (Mark Eydelshteyn), a hotshot 21 year old of über-rich parentage. He pays Ani to visit him at his Brooklyn mansion, which leads to him paying her to be his girlfriend for a week, which snowballs into them getting married in Vegas. This rags to riches arc is edited within an inch of its life, a nonstop stream of reckless youth making poor decisions.
Ani and Ivan make a physically entertaining couple. She’s totally in control of how she uses her body, having learned as much on the job; he’s constantly somersaulting around with the bodily spasms of a kid who has never been subject to a single restraint in his life. Judiciously, Baker shoots a lot of their interactions in two shots or otherwise wide-enough angles to let his leads sprawl out and act with their whole person. Eventually the first-act high comes crashing down—mama and papa find out about their son’s dishonorable marriage and send the family’s handler, an Armenian Orthodox priest, and his two flunkies to break things up—and at this point the film settles down into a silly but somewhat more laboriously paced screwball ensemble piece until the end. The jokes still land but you can just feel the presence of a leaner and probably even better 1h50 cut of the movie somewhere in the 2h19 one that we get.
When it comes to Anora’s politics, Baker errs on the side of saying less but speaking bluntly when he does (see: a scene where Ani claps back at her boss about her lack of health insurance, worker’s comp, and 401(k)2). The message of Anora is intensely legible—sex work (and adjacent labor) is work, not a very empowering form of it, and one with a real psychic toll. But for long stretches of Anora’s runtime, Ani’s presence is attenuated both narratively and visually, leaving you to wonder how much this movie is trying to say about her specifically versus how much she’s just the linchpin for broader comic antics. When someone finally shows Ani a kindness, she reacts, instinctively, by trying to repay it as though it were just another transactional offer at the club. It’s not a groundbreaking ending but it feels like the right one, even if Baker takes his sweet time in maneuvering the plot there.
No Other Land (2024)
For years, the Masafer Yatta cluster of Palestinian villages in the West Bank has been threatened with total destruction by the Israeli Defense Forces. Basel Adra, one of the young men of one of these villages, picked up a camera to document both the encroachments of the IDF and the small acts of resistance by the villagers. In the process he made an unlikely friend and collaborator, the Israeli Yuval Abraham, a law school graduate recently turned journalist for lack of better job prospects. Together, Abraham and Adra assembled a collective of Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers to stand athwart the IDF’s settler colonial violence.
The film starts off in 2019, when Israeli bulldozers roll into town. Rather than plow over everything in one go, the IDF seems intent on waging a sort of psychological warfare by dismantling the villages piece by piece. Today they take out a well, next week a playground, next month a chicken coop. Those who lose their houses relocate to cave dwellings (where, somewhat amusingly, they’re still able to get cable reception). The film mixes planned sequences with visceral, spur-of-the-moment emergency video interventions. In one nighttime scene of a raid on one of the villages, one of the directors drops their camera running away from the IDF and another from the collective switches on their phone to pick up where things leave off. Multiple people are attacked and even shot on film, the consequences of which become subplots through the nearly five years covered by the film. If there’s one crutch the movie leans on a bit too hard it’s the generic documentary soundtrack underlining emotional beats. Without any music No Other Land might have been unwatchable, punishing even, but, as I’ve discussed previously, there are more creative ways of making political and aesthetic statements with music, even on a budget.
The film’s title derives from a line spoken by one of the elderly women of Masafer Yatta. Her people, who have been in the same place for generations, have literally no other land to go to should the IDF succeed in fully displacing them; all that would await them is resettlement in cramped city apartment blocks, cut off from their livestock, their harvests, their history. This last piece is maybe the most important of all. As Rashid Khalidi argues in The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, “the surest way to eradicate a people’s right to their land is to deny their historical connection to it.” Adra et al. are very aware of the importance of keeping their history alive and in the public eye, especially since the IDF’s behavior rests on the ahistorical claim that the people of Masefer Yatta are trespassers on grounds that have always belonged to the Israeli military. In addition to contemporary video, No Other Land also incorporates footage from Adra’s family archives. This includes the story of his hometown’s quest to build a school. During the day the women of the village would keep watch over the construction site to keep IDF soldiers from tampering with it, while at night, after the military had dispersed for dinner, the men of the village would get to work on building the school in the dark. Seeing this backstory makes the eventual destruction of the school all the more heartbreaking.
While helping with the filming, Abraham also wrote about the on-the-ground experience in the villages. In one scene, driving at night with Adra, Abraham bemoans that his most recent article hasn’t gotten very many pageviews. Adra, unfazed, tells him to get used to it and learn a bit of patience, reminding him that everyday Palestinians have been unwaveringly resisting Israeli occupation and oppression for over 75 years. No Other Land bears the marks of both Adra’s patience and Abraham’s urgency; it’s a movie that knows it won’t change the world of its own accord at the same time that it’s convinced of its own absolute necessity to the liberation struggle.
You could also argue that the shallow characterization is a directorial failure of imagination and I wouldn’t put up too much of a fight.
It’s this movie’s version of the sex worker lead in Lizzie Borden’s 1986 Working Girls yelling “You ever hear of surplus value?” at her boss before quitting. Guess we can’t count on 2024 audiences to have read their Marx.