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The film gets finer on every viewing, and now posthumously, it is impossible for me not to read it like a prophetic lightning strike. The sister pairing from Nixon and Ehle is one of the most perfect and complimenting screen sisters I've seen, both are sensitive, Vinnie feels just as much as Emily, she is just more stoic. It is impossible not to think of those haunting performances of Liv Ullman, but this comparison robs the film its originality, with its 19th century American setting, and Nixon's acting that is so personal and unique. She is in some kind of trance. You don't doubt that she believes every word of it. Every emotion, she imprints on you and you understand this picture of the artist and their state. This is also the most witty of all of Davies screenplays, where its interest is not in the passion and theme, it is constructing strings of dialogue like mysterious puzzles. I am only reviewing this because it's in the 6's, I suspect it meets audiences where they are. Sometimes films are ahead of us. To me it is Davies best film because he met a subject that both compliments and transcends his vision. Nixon counters the director's every instinct, while he affords her the center stage; the mark of a great director is to step back. For her, it was a role of a lifetime, really it should have won every award under the sun. I am pretty critical about the kinds of female performances that are awarded. They are child's play compared to this movie. But it wins something better than cheap awards: the canon, universality, eternal relevance. In the sub-genre of films about artists, it is there with the great artist films like Pollock, Vincent & Theo, The Agony and the Ecstasy. The film was just caught up in that 2016-2018 era of audiences where everything was disposable and audiences were cynically only interested in cheap thrills. Many critics were behind it, but for audiences, it felt like homework, the kind of film a teacher puts on during class. Maybe you have to wait for that one right night to watch it where you're most vulnerable to its themes. The film not operating in the abstract, it transcends any theatricality and feels real. It stands alongside the great Ingmar Bergman masterpieces.

In "Anora," one finds an ineffably transcendent exploration of human fragility so staggering it enters in the range of the metaphysical. Its visionary weight is almost too overwhelming. The film's narrative tapes into a diaphanous tapestry beyond a mere "story"-unfolding like an incandescent orchid blooming in starlight, each petal representing the agonizing evolution of the soul. The film obliterates the jejune boundaries of traditional cinema. The cinematography's limpid chiaroscuro conjures up a swirling vortex of visual aphorisms, each frame an invitation to castrate oneself before the ineffable majesty of the image. The performances surpass the pedestrian categories of "good" or "brilliant" choosing to instead ascend into an empyreal realm of emotional exegesis through corporeal performance. One senses not just characters but primordial archetypes searing their way into the viewer's psyche like long lost friends or family members. The soundtrack exquisitely harbors curated motifs reminiscent of archaic liturgical forms weaving themselves around one's senses, gently but with brash force prying open the third eye into that of pure consciousness, like a cosmic lullaby for the spiritually attuned. "Anora" is a sacred rite, a cinematic gauntlet daring us to open our hearts to a dimension of aesthetic nirvana. Those who can surrender to its hypnotic cascading reverie of all old forms of cinema, from its cogent modernity, through its evocative neo-realisim will find themselves rapturously liberated from mundane reality, having glimpsed-if only momentarily-the sublime architecture of existence itself.

It is a powerful question. When you strip out all the melodrama from a production but still retain the same meaning, power, and mythos of the inherent story, what need is all the melodrama? By applying myth to the mundane, it operates directly for we the viewer. However it is not entirely real. The edit is wound together tightly like a clock. The motion and edit is actually fairly stylized, around its sparse concept. In fact is it really so minimalistic and scarce? I have always felt Bresson is more virtuoso than minimalist just in a different way than we think about it. This brings me to the most powerful component of the film, and its biggest statement which haunts the movie, is the running time at only 60 minutes. You are aware of how fast the movie moves, and how it's counting down. The fact it's the minimum length to constitute a feature length film is saying everything, as a response to Dreyer's two hour film--being aware of the production as a prerequisite helps to counter it. The 60 minutes is almost a mic drop, exposing a certain kind of instinct in cinema as entertainment and storytelling. He would utilize this to different ends, even in Lancelot du Lac taking this to its natural conclusion, with virtuosity and minimalism at once, arguably his masterpiece. I was haunted by The Trial of Joan of Arc film for days. It is not minor Bresson as others are saying, it is one of the keys to understand his cinema. When you are ready for it, its power is undeniable.