'Anora' Doesn't Care About Its Namesake
The latest entry into Sean Baker's working-class canon misses the mark—and the potential for a great protagonist
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When The Florida Project premiered in 2017, the movie was an immediate critical success, one that shot its writer and director, Sean Baker, into a new echelon of filmmakers, establishing his reputation as a storyteller with an eye for empathetic depictions of marginalized communities. A slice-of-life story about a young, working-class single mother living with her six-year-old daughter in a Florida motel just a few miles away from the opulence of Disney World, The Florida Project was praised for its “risky and revelatory” depictions of authentic American poverty, in all its brutality and defiant hopefulness.
With Baker’s latest film, Anora, which hit theaters last month after winning the Palme d'Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, it seemed that film’s champion of the working class was back in full force.
Hailed as a “strip club Cinderella story” that, like many of Baker’s films, puts a spotlight on the inner lives of sex workers, Anora follows 23-year-old Anora “Ani” Mikheeva (Mikey Madison), a working-class Brooklyn native who makes her living as a stripper and occasional escort at a high-end Manhattan club when she falls into a whirlwind romance—and soon elopes—with one client, Vanya (Mark Eidelstein), the son of Russian billionaires. But when Ivan’s parents object to the marriage and Ivan himself disappears, Ani suddenly finds herself on a mad dash through New York to reunite with her husband and salvage her new marriage—or at least a bit of her dignity. If only Anora’s execution lived up to such a premise.
But Anora is not The Florida Project. Baker’s critical acclaim may have continued, but the quality of his storytelling—and most importantly, the genuine empathy behind his filmmaking—has not.
At first glance, Anora’s subject—a young sex worker (surrounded by colleagues played by actual sex workers) attempting to break out of her exploitation and achieve upward mobility—felt in line with what made Baker a director to watch. Like The Florida Project and Baker’s two other well-received sex worker-centered films, Tangerine (2015) and Red Rocket (2021), Anora seemed to be an intimate, authentic exploration of a marginalized, oft-dismissed community.
Indeed, at its best, Anora is something like Cinderella meets Pretty Woman meets After Hours, with a fast-paced screwball sense of humor driven by Madison’s excellent performance as Ani. Anora is strongest when Madison is opposite Karren Karagulian as Toros—Ivan’s godfather sent to bring him home to Russia—and Yura Borisov as Igor, Toros’ reluctant henchman, an unlikely trio of would-be detectives each with their own motives to search the city for Ivan. It’s undoubtedly this section of the film that earned its critical acclaim, and not without reason. At first glance, its subject matter—a young sex worker (surrounded by colleagues played by actual sex workers) attempting to break out of her exploitation—felt in line with what made Baker a director to watch. Like The Florida Project and Baker’s two other well-received sex worker-centered films, Tangerine (2015) and Red Rocket (2021), it seemed Anora was an intimate exploration of a marginalized, oft-dismissed working-class community.
But Anora is not, as its name would imply, a film about Anora, so much as it is a film about a series of events that happen to Anora. How the precocious, jaded young woman actually feels about her circumstances is hardly treated as relevant. Whether her defiant resolve to remain married to Vanya is born out of genuine love for her husband or simply a desire to maintain her newfound wealth, Baker doesn’t seem to care, so his audience never learns. If Ani’s feelings did have any bearing, the audience wouldn’t know anyway—we are never allowed to experience Anora’s interiority, or even see the character alone.
For a film praised for its authentic, nuanced examination of sex work, Anora hardly cares about the inner life of the sex worker at its center. Why Ani became a sex worker, how long she has worked at the club, or even how she feels about that work, is apparently not of interest to Baker. Instead, the truth of Anora instead becomes clear about half an hour into the film, when its protagonist is repeatedly physically assaulted in a scene played entirely for laughs, as if her pain is part of some Looney Tunes-esque comedy sequence: Anora is not Anora’s film. It never was.
At its best, Anora is something like Cinderella meets Pretty Woman meets After Hours, with a fast-paced screwball sense of humor driven by Madison’s fearless, gleefully over-the-top performance. Anora is strongest when Madison is opposite Karren Karagulian as Toros—Ivan’s godfather sent to bring him home to Russia—and Yura Borisov as Igor, Toros’ reluctant henchman, an unlikely trio of would-be detectives each with their own motives to search the city for Ivan. Still, even these stronger moments can’t help but reveal Anora’s fatal flaw: Baker does not care about his protagonist.
Instead, when Baker does have any empathy to dole out, his gaze lands not on Ani, but on another character: Igor, the muscle sent to retrieve Ivan. Igor initially appears to be far from the center of Anora’s plot—he is just one of Toros’ multiple henchmen, annoyed at the gruntwork of breaking up yet another of Ivan’s stunts. But before long, Baker seems to insist it’s Igor who is the real heart of the film, Madison’s performance be damned. We peer into Igor’s backstory and inner life—his home, his inner struggle working for a morally reprehensible employer, his budding attraction to Ani—more so than we ever do for Ani herself. By Anora’s final act, the film named for Ani has become almost entirely about proving Igor was actually a good person all along, simply limited by his circumstances. Whether Anora herself is a good person, limited by her own circumstances—and whether that matters at all—has long since left Baker’s mind.
That is because, in lieu of any real character development, Baker’s audience is here to see Ani brutalized, physically and emotionally, at a near-constant pace. (We are decidedly not here to learn how she feels about such brutality). We are here to see her briefly attempt to mount a pseudo-feminist, ultimately unsuccessful turning of the tides, dishing out defiant comebacks to her Russian oligarch in-laws even when they hold all the power. We are here to see her misinterpret acts of love and care because she has never truly experienced either—or at least, we’re here to presume she hasn’t. Even after 139 minutes with Anora, we don’t actually know her at all.
This is the dark truth behind Baker’s Cinderella story: in attempting to spin his tale about a woman continually exploited by men who never quite see her as a full human being, Baker has become one of those men himself. Whatever depth Anora does have seems due entirely to Madison’s performance. In Baker’s hands, she’s little more than a sadistic fetish.
Perhaps Anora was never a screwball comedy to begin with, but a tragedy all along, one revealed when the audience realizes Ani’s humanity never mattered in the first place. No one in Anora’s life will ever truly respect her, nor will they even make an attempt to see the woman behind her sex worker persona—her creator included.
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