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Anora’s Mikey Madison may have won the Oscar for best actress, but the real star of Sean Baker’s madcap anti-love story was New York’s Brighton Beach.
Situated on the southern shore of Brooklyn, next to Coney Island, the tight-knit Russian and eastern European enclave retains a midcentury, pre-gentrification charm. In the film, it is the fairytale setting for Madison’s Anora, a sex worker who falls for and marries the childish son of a Russian oligarch. When the honeymoon period abruptly ends, Anora’s husband runs away and leaves her the hostage of his father’s goons – and Brighton Beach’s boardwalk begins to feel more sinister.
There would be no Anora without Brighton Beach. Baker told Condé Nast Traveler: “It was the desire to shoot there that made this film.” He called the neighborhood “culturally rich” and “visually very exciting”.
Anora’s best picture triumph owed in no small part to this neighborhood’s offbeat charm. (“Thank you Brighton Beach for lending us your beautiful backdrop and incredible community,” Madison said in her acceptance speech.) So, on the morning after the Oscars, how did the locals feel?
Williams Candy shop, a confectionery featured prominently in the movie, sits next door to the Coney Island staple Nathan’s Famous. A friend of Anora’s husband works at the shop, and his father’s henchmen destroy the place when looking for him.
Though Williams has been around since 1941, management welcomes the fresh PR boost from Anora. They’ve been spotlighted on local news segments, including Taxi TV, which plays in the back of cabs. Recently, a copy of a newspaper called Bay News rested on the counter, with Madison on the cover as she posed with the shop’s owner, Peter Agrapides. The publicity has helped Williams ride out the winter months, which typically see fewer customers due to the chill along the water.
“I’m very happy for the store and this publicity,” said Agrapides, whose family has owned the store since 1982. But it wasn’t easy to watch an actor smash glass counters all over his shop, even if they were fake. “That was terrible,” he admitted. “They kept me far away during that scene.”
Anora is now one of the lowest-grossing Oscar winners of the modern era, but enough people liked it to make the journey to Brighton Beach, which is about an hour away from midtown Manhattan on the subway.
At the Ocean View Cafe, another no-frills, homestyle joint where the Anora crew shot a scene, a server named Dennis Kolenkom said he had seen an increase in foot traffic since the movie’s release last fall. “They’re coming in and asking, ‘Is this the same place?’” he said.
A block away at Tatiana’s, a Russian nightclub and grill with wood paneling and a dance floor, the host gruffly shooed away this reporter. Barker told the New York Times that the Anora crew filmed a pivotal scene in the restaurant’s kitchen “Candid Camera-style”: management was in on the project, unlike most of the workers and diners who unwittingly became actors in the film.
At Brighton Beach’s local library, as patrons lined up for English-language classes and conversation groups, a librarian wearing an Anora T-shirt helped an elderly woman who wanted to watch the film figure out how to stream it. (The librarian declined an interview.)
Back on the Brighton Beach boardwalk, Victor Sergev, 37, smoked a cigarette with his afternoon coffee. He hadn’t seen Anora either but wanted to. “I like the costumes,” he said. “When I watched the Oscars, I thought, ‘I want to see that.’”
He added: “I think Ariana Grande [is in it].” (She’s not – that would be Wicked.)
Across from Sergev and next to Tatiana’s stood an adult daycare. Elderly residents shuffled in and out, bundled up in winter coats with big fur trims. One man walked two tiny dogs wearing Christmas sweaters, and nearby two women spoke to each other animatedly in Russian. Anora may be a love letter to Brighton Beach, but the day after its historic Oscar wins, the film’s muse carried on as normal, undisturbed.
