Sean Baker, 2024, 139 minutes

Two of the greatest shots in this movie, as determined on my second viewing when I was, with ravenous intensity, looking out for images which were somehow anxious, thrillingly rebellious, symbolically provocative, and morally distinctive, are filmed in the same location: the white SUV where the titular character, Ani, and the men who’ve been deputized to break up her nascent marriage, are driving from a Brighton Beach mansion to an as-yet-unknown location somewhere else in New York City. These two images — unlike most of the ones that I remember from the movie — are shot from a fixed vantage point, though one of them rattles for the entirety of its runtime (I don’t think it can be more than 10 or 15 seconds long). Each shot takes on the ontological and structural position of the narrative itself; these images escape the so-called “immersion” provided by the third-person handheld images in the rest of the film, and they illuminate a great deal about its narrative architecture and psychology.

The first one comes after the film’s midpoint, an elongated sequence set in the mansion where Ani and her husband Ivan are confronted by men working for Ivan’s father (a Russian business mogul), who beg them to annul their marriage. Ivan, sensing danger, promptly flees the house, and Ani is subsequently restrained, destroys the living room (throws a metal object at a painting, shatters vases, and summarily breaks one of the men’s noses), screams bloody murder, and is muffled with a scarf. After the apocalypse is over, the four characters depart the mansion and embark on an anxious search for Ivan throughout the city. It’s at this point, when they’ve left the mansion, that the first notable shot arrives.

Here, Baker mounts his camera at the front of the car, and we can see Ani and Igor (who restrained her for the mansion scene) in the back seat, with Toros and Garnik, the other men, viewed partially as they sit in front. During the shot, Igor leans over to Ani to apologize for how the mansion encounter developed, she virulently rejects his sympathetic gesture, and the car makes a sudden halt, launching the characters forward. The image’s job is twofold: 1) to fossilize their speechlessness and exhaustion, and make obvious their collective resignation, and 2) literally reignite the plot’s engine, since we know we are on the road to somewhere, but have no idea where yet.

The second shot bookends the long search sequence. After several hours roaming around Brighton Beach and Manhattan, they have finaly found Ivan, “plastered” (as Ani says) and unresponsive, they have thrown him back in the car, and are driving to a Manhattan courthouse to annul the marriage. As Toros, the leader of the four men, berates Ivan for his destructive patterns and blatant disrespect, the camera is mounted on the dashboard, capturing Ani as she wipes tears from her face. The road makes the shot rattle: we are one with the motion of her tears and the industrial lurch of the car — almost as if the paradigm-obliterating journey she’s experienced has been transferred onto the screen in the structure of the image.

What one could call the “unflinchingness” of these two shots — because of their capturing of defeated resignation — encapsulates the film’s storytelling engine. In these frozen moments, what we are witnessing is psychological teleology in motion. The symbolic import freely leaps out of these images, not just because they are displays of technically marvelous and intellectually pressurized performances (portraying devastating realizations and, in effect, pausing the movie), but also because they display the film recalibrating its own language. 

This is for two reasons. First, any still shot in the largely handheld film is effectively a reset for Baker as director — these images might as well be the establishing shots in how they lay out the grounds of the narrative, and put forth the emotional template of the scene to come or the scene immediately preceding it. Secondly, the existence of the shots betrays a very deep psychological structure of motivation. If the camera’s wish in realist cinema is to emulate what a potential person could see in the course of the film’s events (even a narratively invisible third person), these images display for us a dream of psychology piercing through the film’s antic journeys.

The first shot in the car betrays a wish for pinning-down and visualizing the characters’ collective trouble — it is nearly rendering the first moment they become a haunted and united front in the aftermath of their mansion fight. The second shot of Ani crying displays a desire to identify the exact moment things definitively crumble for her interior dreams; it’s a collective wish we have, as a viewing public, for a psychological reconstruction of the precise moment things become untenable or irreversible for a person. So we can locate, in this shot, within a narrative full of thunderous betrayals, another point of no return.