I Grew Up on Brighton Beach. Anora Helped Me See My Neighborhood Differently

“I can speak Russian, but I prefer not to.” The line hits me like a gut punch as the first act of director Sean Baker's new movie Anora unfolds. It’s a line purred, albeit reluctantly, by the titular protagonist, Anora (Mikey Madison), a Russian-speaking, Uzbek-American sex worker—who prefers to be called the more Americanized nickname Ani—as her boss at a Manhattan strip club asks her to meet a new client: Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), the twenty-something son of a Russian oligarch.

This line kicks into gear a modern Cinderella story gone horribly wrong (spoilers ahead): a torrid affair between Ani and Ivan (Vanya, for short) that explores systems of power, safety, love (ultimately), and the Russian diaspora of New York City.

It’s also a line I know well; I have said it more times than I can count. 

Like Ani, I grew up on Brighton Beach, the Russophone neighborhood in south Brooklyn, N.Y., and the backdrop of Baker’s film, in theaters Oct. 18. And like Ani, for the longest time, I despised absolutely everything about it. A hometown is a hometown, after all.

Filmed in the winter, so much of Anora is a joyride around different nooks and crannies of this neighborhood and its surroundings. After Vanya hires Ani to be his “horny girlfriend” for a week for $15,000, they spend a brief, debaucherous weekend in Vegas and spontaneously marry each other. Upon returning to New York and thinking she has finally “caught her whale,” Ani and Vanya’s marital bliss is cut short when his parents find out about the union and send his godfather, an Armenian man named Toros (Karren Karagulian), Toros’ younger brother Garnik (Vache Tovmasyan), and their henchman, a Russian named Igor (Yuriy Borisov), to force Vanya and Ani to get an annulment. After a brief altercation, Vanya runs away, forcing the three men to search for him, with a reluctant Ani in tow.

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It's here that Baker introduces Brighton Beach in all its glory—and with it, not only the vast cultural melting pot once bound by a shared history of Soviet rule, but also and perhaps more crucially, the unique outsider status that consumes first-generation Americans like me.

About 16 miles from Manhattan, Brighton Beach has been a safe haven for immigrants from the former Soviet Union to create a new life in America since the mid-1970s. Among them were my parents, who immigrated from Odesa, Ukraine, to the U.S. in the early ‘90s after the dissolution of the USSR. After a stint in another south Brooklyn neighborhood, they settled in Brighton Beach when I started the first grade.

Like other first-gen kids, I’ve never felt all too comfortable here or there—not totally American but certainly not Russian. In fact, my Russian is cobbled together from stilted conversations with family (them speaking Russian, me often responding in English) and imaginary conversations in my head where I practice what I say in Russian before I open my mouth. I’m not so confident at rolling my R’s, but I try my best.

For much of my childhood, I wanted out. Especially during the winter, as the blustering windchill would hit the Atlantic coastline, making it so cold it would rattle your brain loose. Why do people stay here, I wondered. Why can’t we just leave, I grumbled. The sooner, the faster, the better, I pleaded to my parents, and everyone else who would listen.

It's funny how one generation’s safety can become the next generation’s stifling boredom—a feral need to shed a place like old skin and grow into something more exciting, glossier. This tension is laid bare in Anora. What Ani thinks of Brighton Beach and what Baker—who grew up just across the river in Summit, N.J.—thinks of it feels starkly different: the former can’t wait to escape it, and the latter sees, despite its cracks, its undeniable beauty.

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Anora is propulsive and anxious—its characters consistently in search of what’s next, what’s new. Ani isn’t interested in being called by her full name, nor is she interested in staying in Brighton Beach. She doesn’t want to be the stereotype of the neighborhood girl who stays. She, too, wants out, and she’s doing what she must to get there.

Baker, though, has other plans. With every moment, despite the frenzy of the search party, Baker hangs his camera back, just slightly, to provide stillness. We see it when Ani walks along the boardwalk to the Brighton Beach Russian restaurant staple, Tatiana, where she and the gang of three think they might find Vanya. The orange radiance of the sun as it begins to set on the water. The boardwalk glowing from the rays and stretching out seemingly forever. The array of colors along the horizon, even as the posse slumps out of the restaurant, heads hung low, unable to find their mark, wind gusts thrashing against them. It’s another dead end and yet, the sky behind them bursts with vivid reds, greens, yellows, blues as night falls. Brighton Beach can be a relentless show-off that way, your feelings be damned.

Perhaps that’s the most important thing Anora cemented for me. Sometimes, it can feel so shocking when someone can see you and your story more clearly, or more tenderly, than you can ever see yourself. It creates a sense of depth that helps things become less two-dimensional. That’s what Baker does for Ani, for Igor (who eventually falls for her), and for this little enclave of Brooklyn that’s often forgotten, cast aside, or worse, stereotyped. There were plenty of jokes in the film, but Brighton Beach never felt like the punchline. It felt in control of its own narrative.

Over the years, I’ve started to change my tune on Brighton Beach and swung around to see Baker’s side of things a bit more. I’m less afraid of using my broken Russian. I’m also beginning to appreciate the neighborhood in its wintry splendor. When the sky is cloudless and the sun’s rays beat down on the calm, rippling waves, making them sparkle. The boardwalk—far from the bustling scene it usually is during the summertime—is barren, save, of course, for the elderly Russian ladies wrapped up in winter puffers or fur coats (real ones), swinging their arms around in furious circles to get their exercises in. Manhattan is behind you. The beach is in front. I’ve stopped fighting it.

At the end of Anora, Vanya and Ani get their marriage annulled. Ani is heartbroken and feels powerless. Vanya couldn’t seem to care less. Toros is back in Vanya’s parents’ good graces. Igor, increasingly infatuated with Ani, tries to take care of her. The natural order has been restored; the wealthy get their way and the striver, officially out of luck, is knocked all the way back down to where she started.

The last we see of the movie is Ani, broken by all that she has experienced, sitting in Igor’s car. Ani tries to seduce him and begins to have sex with him in the driver’s seat. Igor tries to kiss her. She, at first resisting, finally gives into her emotions and wails deeply, as if to say she’s stopped fighting, too.

I can’t stop thinking about what happens in the moments after the screen fades to black. Or at least what I hope happens to Ani weeks, months, years after this. I hope she finds what home means to her. I hope knowing more about where she’s from feels less burdensome. I hope that stillness doesn’t feel like death, but rather, like a breath of fresh air. I hope the tinsel in her hair continues to sparkle when she twerks, like the sun’s rays hitting the sea water on an icy day.

I’m hopeful for her. For all of us.