Anora & The French Connection
The elevated train isn’t just transit—it’s a symbol of power, escape, and who gets left behind.
The Screech of Steel
The elevated train never stops. It groans, rattles, and cuts through the city like an exposed nerve. From Brooklyn to Queens, from the Bronx to Manhattan, it scrapes against the sky, carrying the desperate, the doomed, and the dangerous. Below, the streets churn—cops chasing criminals, hustlers dodging fate, people slipping between the cracks. The train doesn’t care. It keeps moving, indifferent to the struggles beneath it.
In The French Connection (1971), Popeye Doyle chases a killer who glides away on the train, safe above the chaos. Doyle, all fury and frustration, barrels through the streets below, trying to keep up, knowing he’s already lost. In Anora (2024), the train looms in the background, a reminder of escape and inevitability. It’s there when Anora thinks she’s winning. It’s there when she realizes she’s trapped.
The elevated train binds them. Two people clawing against systems that don’t lose. Two lives caught in motion, unable to stop. The train keeps going, whether they make it or not.
The Hustle and the Trap
Anora and Doyle are both chasing something. She’s after a way out—security, a future beyond the clubs, beyond the grind. He’s after justice, or maybe just a victory in a war he’s long since lost sight of. Neither of them plays by the rules. They can’t afford to.
Anora is a Brooklyn sex worker who marries into wealth, thinking she’s finally found a way up. What she doesn’t realize is that the game is rigged. The Russian oligarchs she’s tied herself to don’t just reject her—they move to erase her. She pushes back. She fights. But the world she stepped into isn’t built for her to win.
Doyle is a wrecking ball of a cop, chasing a French heroin smuggling ring through the streets of New York. He’s got the instincts of a predator but the discipline of a man unraveling at the seams. He moves through the city like he owns it, but the criminals he hunts are always one step ahead. The law is a joke. Justice is an illusion. All that’s left is the chase.
The Train as the Unreachable
Both films use the elevated train as a symbol of escape, power, and inevitability. In The French Connection, it’s a literal getaway vehicle. The criminal Popeye is after boards the train, smooth and untouchable, while Doyle—furious, reckless, desperate—steals a car and speeds through the streets below, swerving, crashing, almost losing control at every turn. The train soars above it all, detached from the chaos, while Doyle fights a losing battle with gravity, steel, and time.
In Anora, the train is more of a shadow, a constant presence in the city’s skyline, its metal shriek a soundtrack to her struggle. It’s there when she feels powerful, when she thinks she’s outmaneuvered the people coming for her, and when she realizes how deep she’s in. The train moves above it all, just like the oligarchs, who see her as nothing more than an inconvenience. She is stuck below, in the trenches, where survival is not guaranteed.
Who Wins? Who Survives?
Doyle is driven by obsession. He hunts the bad guys with the same brutality they use to move their product. He believes in the chase, even when it costs him everything. In the end, he doesn’t win—he keeps going. The criminal world doesn’t break. It bends, it shifts, it adapts. Doyle is left in the wreckage, still trying to catch a ghost.
Anora isn’t fighting for a case. She’s fighting for her life. And the people coming for her? They don’t have to chase. They pull strings from high above, where money moves faster than law, where power doesn’t need to get its hands dirty. She tries to beat them at their own game, but the game was never meant for her.
The Train Keeps Moving
At its core, The French Connection is about justice slipping through your fingers. Anora is about power pressing down on you until you disappear. But both leave their characters in the same place—still running, still fighting, while the city keeps grinding forward, oblivious.
And above it all, the train rolls on.