With Anora, indie darling Sean Baker (The Florida Project, Tangerine) crafts a raucous, punchy, screwball comedy that makes compelling, if shallow, observations about the realities of labour.
We meet Anora (Mikey Madison), or Ani as she prefers, at her workplace: a New York City strip club. With a nuanced, humanizing depiction of sex work typical of his films, Baker presents Anora’s labour like any other. She eats from Tupperware on her break, maintains workplace friendships and rivalries and bitingly demands her boss for a 401K.
Anora is not really about sex work — it’s about labour. Sex work is just one form.
Through her work, Anora encounters Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), the wealthy son of a Russian oligarch who evolves from client to husband in the span of a few whirlwind weeks.
Anora and Vanya’s romance blurs the lines between fantasy and reality, work and private life. She gives him the American dream and he offers her a Cinderella story. It’s a transaction, bound up in all the power imbalances of paid labour, though neither substantially acknowledges this. Instead, they call it love.
Shot with immersive magnetism and frenzied energy by director of photography Drew Daniels, Anora pulls us into the fantasy, even as we feel a looming apprehension that it must soon come crashing down.
And it does, as Vanya’s family sends three strongmen to annul the marriage — but this is not an easy feat. Anora screams, kicks, and bites, resisting them in every way. And Vanya? Nowhere to be found.
This is where Anora truly kicks off. The henchman and the sex worker are two character types usually reduced to just that — types. But in Anora, they’re not side characters in the film, they are the film.
Both Anora and the henchman are workers, and both sell their bodies. She offers sex, they offer muscle. Neither receive respect from the people who pay them. Vanya and his family do not care about the humans performing the labour. But Baker does, and this is what sets Anora apart.
Still, some reservations sit uncomfortably beneath the film’s surface, preventing it from fully taking hold. Anora presents its characters with humanity, but perhaps the film is praised more for achieving this than for how it does so. Does the subject matter overcompensate for the filmmaking?
And how fully realized is Anora’s character? Madison is brilliant in the role, striking a delicate balance between fierceness and vulnerability, scintillating assurance and touching naivete. But does Anora’s depth, complexity and characterization fall too squarely on Madison’s shoulders?
Anora can sometimes feel like a pawn for Baker’s message, prompting the question: when does commenting on power structures end up reinforcing them?
These nagging criticisms are somewhat assuaged by the film’s final scene, which packs an emotional punch — and still leaves room for hope.
With humour, high energy and humanity, Baker delivers an undeniable message: these workers are united by their labour, discarded and dismissed by the rich whom they serve. Searching for much depth, nuance or complexity beyond that only dulls the film’s spark.
Featured image by IMDb.
