‘Anora’ Is More Than a Brooklyn Cinderella Story

A sex worker in a romantic comedy isn’t new. How the Oscar-nominated film uses immigrant Brooklyn to subvert the genre? That’s different.

That location is everything turns out to be a truth nearly as relevant to romantic comedies as it is to real estate. If you cannot recall where two characters find each other or rekindle something long dormant, then the rest of the movie probably isn’t worth remembering.

There is nearly nothing forgettable about Sean Baker’s “Anora,” which picked up six Oscar nominations on Thursday, among them best picture and best director, a film virtually unsurpassed in its use of place and architecture to make the thematic arguments at its core.

The best romantic comedies deliver aggressively on geography, so much so that to ask where “Four Weddings and a Funeral” or “Love, Actually” or any Nora Ephron film is set, can seem like wanting to know which of the ancient empires belonged to Caesar. By now, even if you have not seen “Anora,” you have likely heard that it is a Brooklyn love story with Brooklyn drawn well beyond the parameters of bourgeois cliché.

We are many, many subway stops away from open shelving and tastefully patinated kitchen fixtures, away from people falling in love because they both dig Elizabeth Bishop or Wellfleet in the off-season.

Much of the film unfolds in Mill Basin, far from any bookstore or even a subway station, in a 14,000-square-foot house that sits on a point in Jamaica Bay and channels Las Vegas. Occupied by a 21-year-old gamer named Vanya, the aimless son of a Russian oligarch, it sits as a monument to the moral failings of the dubiously rich.