(Movie Review - Inventing Anna) ¦ The Audacity of Being Broke: How To Fake It Till You Make It

 Movie title: Inventing Anna. || Score: 6.5/10  || Producer: Shonda Rhimes

There are two ways to make it to the top; you either crawl your way up there or you fly on the backs of people who are already heading there. Most people use the first option, but Anna Delvey, like others who share her thoughts, prefer the second.

You don’t have to do much work – you just have to know how to lie a lot. A whole lot, with mild or strong drama. You don’t even have to be a beautiful person. You can literally be fugly but with the right connects you’ll dine and wine with the “who is who” of the society, you’ll sashay your way into exclusive clubs, be famous, fabulous, and have millions dying to walk in your shoes. Wanting to live the kind of your life. 

You just need two things: a hell lot of audacity immersed in the right connections.

Anna “Delvey” Sorokin’s hustle is not legit. The 25yrs old girl literally lied and scammed her way to the top. She was a broke ass poor girl – like zero dollar poor, but with some very fine set of skills: an imaginative mind, creative ideas, river Nile length worth of audacity, small acting skills, and a convincing personality. 

However, the most intriguing part of her story was that she fooled some of the brightest, richest, biggest, and smartest minds in the game. She did not just pull the wool over their eyes – she wrapped them in cottons and turned them puppets and that’s something not just any person can do successfully.

Anna realized that you can be poor but when you have the rich on your speed dials; when you are always in their cohorts; when you let others tell your own story exactly how you wanted it to be told; when you can bring the most complex minds together to do your bidding; and when you flash a few hundred of dollars around, the world stops spinning and finally will give you the attention you want.

Anna Delvey rode a private jet without paying for it, lived in about seven different suites in five-star luxurious hotels without pay, toured places without paying and met people whom she used mercilessly. She was spending money like she came from money - well, she was accumulating debt and not really spending cash. And the funny thing is people around her saw the patterns, saw the loopholes but did not fit the puzzles.

Anna exploited people - used them for her own gains. She makes smart people lose their thinking rights. She was letting other people unknowingly fund her lifestyle. She did not only scam people, she scammed banks, organizations and businesses. She was a German version of the Nigerian Hushpuppi.

How did she do it? First, Anna understood how worlds works. In the fashion world, it is about sense, style and poise. You either have those three or you'll come off looking thirsty and fake. You can’t afford to dress anyhow, you can't afford to be wearing fake pieces, and also you can't afford to be attention-seeking. The fashion world thrives on originality and Anna as sure as hell knows how to create originals from counterfeits.

In the arts world, it is all about taste, history, and small amount of cruelty. Artists who do not know or remember stuff about artworks don't deserve to be called artist. You have to know about arts and that takes reading and history lessons. Also, artists who have poor taste or can't show some sense of sophistication won’t be taken serious too.

In the business world, it’s about having the right connections, advisers, leverage, and the perfect pitch. With these things you'll secure meetings with people who on a normal day won't consider you worthy of their time. Anna doesn’t have cash but she made everyone believed she was born into one. She wore this aura of originality and greatness that no one was bold enough to pull off the cloak.

And to cap if off, she made these people look dumb so most of them chose to either stay silent, suck behind closed doors, and move on with their losses than come forward and admit that they've been scammed. She made herself the victim, and hell yeah, white people always love the victims. She revelled in attention and care and made people do dumb things for her and you begin to wonder whether there was some sort of witchcraft handiwork in her case.

Anna wanted to live the American dream. It was her goal but she was delusional about it. I mean, up till the very not-so-bitter end, she never admitted to herself that she was nothing but a small, incompetent, sorry excuse of a con artist. Anna wanted to live large, and of course, she did live large but it was for a very brief period of time. 

Technically she did not tell these lie herself; it was the people around her that did the trumpeting. She was a German heiress to some, she was about to launch her own foundation to other, she owns a trust fund that worth about 65 million dollars, etc. All fantastical stories with zilch truth in them.

An honest person with the kind of connection that Anna had would have built something for themselves, but not Anna. She wanted the world and she wanted it now. So she used people's connections to grow more connections destroying each one along the line. She lied and used more lies to cover each one. She was mean, selfish, showed psychopathic tendencies at some point, and at the end of the day, she landed in jail.

Anna understood the word "hustle", saw it in others and herself, but everything all started from when she was a kid. It also helps to cement the fact that we are all products of our upbringing and formative years, and to solve every problem, you have to go to the roots.

© Ololade Edun.

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Ololade Edun is a contemporary Nigerian Creative, Microbiologist, and a medical student. His pieces are experimental and they dissect societal themes.

His works have been published or are forthcoming on The Kalahari Review, Lolwe, Brittle Paper, Voice Lux Journal, Melbourne Culture Corner, The Shallow Tales Review, Mixed Mag, The Scribe Post, EBOquills, Afro Lit Mag, The B'K, Pawners Papers, Parousia Mag, Neuro Logical, Literandra & elsewhere. 

Ololade is an editor for AWS, and a podcaster for The GhostPen Project. When he is not writing, Ololade is reading or drowning in Indian/Pakistani playback songs. Say "Hi" on Twitter @OloladeWrites.