Patron Pick – Anora

This special reward is available to Patreon patrons who pledge at the $10 or $20 monthly levels. Each month, those patrons will pick a film for me to review. If they choose, they also get to include some of their thoughts about the movie. This Pick comes from Matt Harris.

Anora (2024)
Written and directed by Sean Baker

Of Sean Baker’s films that I have seen (Tangerine, The Florida Project, Red Rocket, and this one), it is pretty clear he has an interest in sex workers. More specifically, Baker is fascinated with the class politics of being a sex worker. It is a job where the class divide is screamingly evident every second of the transaction. In this way, sex work is one field of labor that highlights the contradictions in the United States, where lies are fed to us from birth about the “American Dream” and meritocracy. It is also very important to Baker that these characters be presented as human beings so that the audience sees the desperation of our protagonists to escape their economic lot in life. He also doesn’t fear these characters being deeply flawed and often unlikable. 

Life is an endless grind for Ani (Mikey Madison), a 23-year-old stripper constantly hustling to stay above water. It seems her golden goose arrives with Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), the son of a Russian oligarch. The young man does nothing but play video games all day and party into the night. He wants to pay Ani to be at his side and fuck him, she needs the money and doesn’t mind the work, so they have a deal. It becomes clear that Ivan’s parents want him back in Russia, so he convinces Ani to a Vegas wedding so he can remain in the States. That’s not going to stand, and Ivan’s handlers in the U.S. are sent to forcibly bring him back and annul the marriage.

Classifying Baker’s films under the standard genres is very hard. Anora challenges us even more by presenting this as drama following our title character. Around the halfway point, when the Armenians tasked with wrangling Ivan show up, the movie diverts into some genuinely funny comedy. I was reminded a bit of the Coen Brothers; though the movie doesn’t attempt to mimic the exact style of the Coens, it does capture the chaotic humor behind trying to control such a situation. There’s lots of slapstick between Ani and the three men who show up while Ivan abandons her and runs away. 

Anora is one of the saddest and funniest films you’ll likely see in 2024, a testament to Baker’s skill as a filmmaker and Madison’s choices in performing Ani. It does all this without needing a high concept or escapist genre. Ani doesn’t become a gun-wielding vigilante on the hunt for revenge. Neither is she a sex doll caricature. She’s a person who sees an opportunity to escape the life she has and live comfortably…for a while. A significant question while watching this movie is whether she is ever really in love with Ivan? From my viewing, I never believed the things he said to her. He’s so impulsive that he says anything to please people at the moment.

I would argue that Ani knows this relationship and subsequent marriage aren’t the real thing. She clings to them for a variety of reasons. Living with Ivan and not having to work at the club is much nicer. She also makes such a big deal upon her exit from her work that to go back weeks later would be a tremendously humiliating experience. Beyond that, it would also be an existential horror, an admission that the sex work life is the best she can possibly do for herself, that it isn’t leading to anything better.

I’ve seen some critiques of the film that we don’t get to see anything of Ani outside of her sex work. Her personal life seems to be non-existent. I don’t think that was an accident. I also don’t think Baker is saying anything broadly about sex work in this regard but telling the story of this specific character. Ani is a loner. We can see this at the club, where she doesn’t seem to have any exceptionally close friends. There are definitely other strippers she gets along with and those she clashes with. She’s even distant from her roommate, who we glimpse twice throughout the picture. There’s a single drive for Ani, and that is earning money to find a way out.

Baker has cited Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria as a core influence, which I see. That film was also less interested in the plot than it was in being a character study. All of Baker’s work could fall into this same category. We don’t really remember plot beats; often, the films work episodically, but we remember the characters. Sin-Dee. Moonee. Halley. Mikey. Strawberry. It was seeing those characters go through the struggle of living that remains with us, not a shocking twist or exciting conclusion.

I was only broadly familiar with Mikey Madison. I’d seen clips here and there from her work on Pamela Adlon’s Better Things and then her villainous turn in Scream 2022. I had never seen this from her; it is a transcendent performance. Baker allows the camera to linger on Madison’s face, even in some scenes where another character is doing all of the talking. We see her react or, in some instances, try to hold back her emotions. The emphasis is that the person talking is not as crucial as Ani’s emotions and feelings about what they are saying. 

Baker has zero interest in making a romantic comedy about an unlikely couple because he ultimately wants his work to be authentic to the human experience. Fairy tales aren’t true, and real love involves a lot of time and work. Sex work is often used as a shortcut by many men, mistaking the paid affection they receive as the real thing. Ani is always upfront about her labor costs, but the men she works for are eager to forget that part of the equation. Anora is more Uncut Gems than Pretty Woman and is all the better for that. 

Madison and Baker are insistent on never shaming Ani for what she does. Sometimes, the character would like to get caught up in the fantasy, too, but that’s simply a thing she can’t afford to do. So, when she agreed to marry Ivan, I felt my stomach sink, knowing that she’d forgotten the business side of this interaction.

We never get an explicit backstory for Ani, which I greatly appreciated, and instead, we learn about the character through her actions. I am far less interested in a character’s childhood than seeing them put in a tense situation and watching how they react. Will they try to sweet-talk & negotiate or gnaw their own arm off to escape? How characters react tells us absolutely everything we need to know about them.

Where Baker chooses to end the film will likely draw a mix of reactions from the audience. It’s a complicated scene overflowing with subtext and emotions, but at its center is Ani, who seems to have lost after the hell she was put through. She did what everything and everyone around her had said to do: she went after that bag. When all is said and done, there’s undoubtedly a decent chunk of change in her bank account.

But that’s not all her agreement with Ivan was about. It wasn’t even really about him. She only experiences love as part of a never-ending struggle and always in the context of customers. At one point, Ani tells someone who tries to explain the meaning of her full name, “Anora,” that in America, people don’t care about names and meanings. Which is very true. In America, so many people care only about what they can get from you for their pleasure, tossing you to the side when your usefulness has ended.