Most of us turn a blind eye to sex workers. Director and NYU alum Sean Baker holds up a camera to them instead. Whether chronicling the lives of transgender sex workers in Los Angeles in “Tangerine,” a mother soliciting sex work out of a motel next to Disney World in “The Florida Project” or a washed-up porn star returning to his Texas hometown in “Red Rocket,” Baker has dedicated much of his career to destigmatizing sex work — and more importantly, the marginalized communities that make up a majority of sex workers.
Baker’s newest feature film and Cannes Film Festival winner, “Anora,” is a continuation of this commitment, with Baker dedicating the award — and film itself — to “sex workers past, present and future.”
“Anora” follows its titular character, nicknamed Ani (Mikey Madison), an exotic dancer from Brooklyn who captivates clientele at the strip club HQ with her fiery spirit and sparkly hair tinsel. A typical work day involves listening to her dancer friends lament about 40-year-old clients who are “basically geriatric” or dodging catfights with her boy-crazy coworker Diamond (Lindsey Normington). When not under the neon lights of HQ, small-talking and straddling her clientele, Ani barely gets by in her noisy apartment, where the subway line disrupts her sleep after a long night. Despite her high-stress hustler lifestyle, Ani never loses her spunk; she’s vivacious when demanding her boss to approve her requests for time off or screaming “jealousy’s a disease” at Diamond during their work quaffles. She knows what it takes to get by, and we love her for it, even if she has to coax a client to the ATM mid-striptease.
But Ani’s offered a rags-to-riches story when her slight familiarity with the Russian language gets her paired up with young client Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn). Son of wealthy oligarch Nikolai Zakharov (Aleksei Serebryakov), Vanya gallivants around New York City burning through his family’s savings. Lapdances become house calls, and, eventually, he’s paying top dollar for Ani to be his fake girlfriend, so long as she’ll attend his Gatsby-level New Year’s Eve party at his Brighton Beach mansion and pleasure him while he’s cursing over a Call of Duty game. The daddy’s-money-spending, leather-wearing Vanya couldn’t be from a more different pond than Ani — maybe that’s why the two become so enthralled with one another, even get hitched at a Vegas chapel on a trip Vanya insisted on just because the best ketamine is in Nevada. “Anora” seems like the perfect Cinderella story until Vanya’s parents call him and threaten a trip to the United States to take him and his green card back to Russia. Then, our princess is stuck on a wild goose chase, searching for Vanya, who disappears after his father sends a clan of goons to wrangle him and annul the marriage.
In “Anora,” each conflict is exacerbated by the incompetence of the rich. Oligarch Nikolai spam-calls one of his minions, Toros (Karren Karagulian), during a church service, interrupting his pleasantries with parishioners just to go babysit Vanya until his parents’ private jet touches down. Vanya spends most of his marriage with Ani sticking up the middle finger to mommy and daddy across the ocean and calling them various English insults, but books it out of the mansion in his luxury pajamas and goes on an insane bender around the city once he discovers they’re on their way. While we begin “Anora” rooting for the couple, we quickly learn that there’s nothing truly endearing about bratty Vanya, unless you count his nepo-baby fortune. He’s never worked a day in his life, opting to sit on his giant couch and play on his PlayStation while his slew of housekeepers try to dust around him.
The ultimately pathetic Vanya and his great escape enables us to sympathize with Ani, who began to believe in their young love, and Nikolai’s fixers — Toros, Igor (Yura Borisov) and Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) — too. The three of them first meet our protagonist in a long, hilarious attempt to keep Ani from running after Vanya. Despite Ani hook-punching and biting, the characters come to a tacit understanding that the four of them each come from similar stations of life. Much like Ani working at HQ to keep the lights on, the three fixers wait at Nikolai’s beck and call so they can care for their families at home. Each of them expend themselves again and again for the rich, a thankless job that never ends in recognition of their humanity.
In “Anora,” Ani was never meant to keep her Cinderella story. Her prince in Prada sweatpants can’t manage to see their relationship beyond a transaction for her body, and he never has the guts to correct his parents when they call her a whore, prostitute or hooker. In this less-than-happy ending, Baker calls us as naive as the screwball love between Ani and Vanya. If we can’t see sex workers past their stereotypes and labels, then we aren’t ready for Ani to trade her stripper heels for glass slippers.
Contact Dani Biondi at [email protected].
