Anora Is a Wake-Up Call From the American Dream

Sean Baker has spent much of his recent career profiling one of the most marginalized categories of labor in America, the sex worker, in ways that are refreshingly matter-of-fact. The director always manages to depict the ways in which people working in the sex industry are locked out of legitimate society and systems — take washed-up porn star Mikey's failed attempts to find gainful employment in Red Rocket or unemployed stripper Halley's struggle to collect TANF benefits in The Florida Project. Yet as much as he supports the workers, his new film Anora, which won the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival, makes clear his aversion to the industry and the hierarchical, patriarchal structures it supports. It is a film about the illusory, degraded American Dream and the boundaries of class that cannot be crossed.

Sex work is neither a dream career nor a trap for Anora (Mikey Madison, in a star-making performance), who goes by Ani — it's work, nothing more. The opening scenes of the film scroll through her workday in a swanky Manhattan strip club. She woos clients into paying for private dances, argues with her boss about benefits, puffs on her vape, and fields regressive, cliché questions and disturbing comments. One patron asks, "Do your parents know you do this?" Another tells Ani's coworker she reminds him of his teenage daughter. All this while performing the acrobatic feats required of an exotic dancer. Then she rides the train all the way back to Brighton Beach, a Russian enclave at the end of the train in Brooklyn.

No matter the job, though, every working person has the same dream that one day they won't have to work anymore. This is part of what makes Ani fall so hard for Ivan "Vanya" Zakharov (Mark Eydelshteyn), the son of a Russian oligarch (Aleksei Serebryakov), who has never worked a day in his life. It helps that he's young and charming, turning his limited grasp of English into a cute personality trait, but his riches and lifestyle seduce her as much as she seduces him. After he invites her over to his father's mansion for sex, their escalating negotiations over her time with him become a playful game. She desires him, but she can't just give herself to him. He asks her to sleep over on New Year's — "I have holiday rates," she chides. Then she demands $15,000 "cash, upfront" when he asks her to become his live-in girlfriend for a week. "If I were you, I would have accepted nothing less than 30," he retorts.

The week passes in a bravura sequence, briskly edited by Baker himself into an anarchic blur of hedonism redolent of the Safdies and Scorsese. We cut from club to club, from popped bottles in hot tubs to private jets to Vegas, casino tables to energetic sex. Finally, the last deal: Ivan proposes marriage, and Ani lifts her ring finger and says, "Three carats." He responds, "What about four? Or five? Or six?" Fireworks explode silently on the video ceiling in one of Vegas' many malls as the couple celebrates, hinting unsubtly that their marital bliss may be as artificial as the sky above them.

Who is in control here? At first, we might think Ani really has succeeded in manipulating this horny idiot into lifting her into the leisure class. Yet his willingness to play her game betrays the fact that he's in another league. When Ivan declares, "I am always happy" during a couples' massage, we know he means it — the guy lives without consequences and has never wanted for anything. But everything he possesses comes from his father, an ocean away in Russia. The dreamlike nature of the film's first half — another post-marriage montage showing Ani getting the ring, a sable coat, and a vigorous fuck on a white fur rug set to the euphoric strains of "Greatest Day" by Take That, feels like a glossy pop music video — reflects the fantasy and the fakeness of his life, built on wealth he didn't earn and privileges he will lose when his parents come to set things straight.
Still, Ani finds herself enraptured by him all the same. Madison's deep commitment to the role extends to her character's physicality: In the first of several shots of her and Ivan having sex, she's on top, but she gradually grants him more positional dominance. By the time they're married, she's wrapped around him, gazing up pleadingly as he plays video games before she initiates intercourse. Her escape from the sex industry and the pawing hands of many men has merely made her into a toy for one. Blinded by love, she doesn't realize she can be discarded as soon as she becomes inconvenient — and she does, quickly, as the film shifts into an extended comedown from the bender of the first half.

News of Ivan's marriage quickly reaches his father's goon squad, a Three Stooges-like group of the former Soviet Union's most reluctant henchmen. Motivated above all by fear of the oligarch's wrath — or rather that of his domineering wife, Galina (Darya Ekamasova) — Ivan's godfather Toros (Karren Karagulian, a regular of Baker's films) skips out on his duties as an Orthodox priest to wrangle his godson. Their exasperated quest to break up the marriage becomes a source of constant, raucous comedy. Ivan bolts when they show up at the house, and a ridiculous, darkly funny passage ensues in which the crew binds and gags Ani after she sucker-punches two of them and screams "rape" in order to attract attention. (Indeed, from Ani's perspective as a sex worker, the situation is a nightmare worst-case scenario.) They cajole her into helping track Ivan down before his parents' plane arrives from Moscow, searching every nook and cranny of Brighton Beach for him.

I find it helpful to contrast the men in the film and how they relate to Ani. We've already discussed Ivan. Toros and Garnik (Vache Tovmasyan), the Armenians, never for a second believe sincerely, as she does, that the marriage is a legitimate act of devotion. They know Ivan too well, but they also know (and fear) his parents enough to consider her a threat: A gold-digging interloper who doesn't understand how badly the Zakharovs could crush them all. "He shamed his family by marrying someone like you," Toros tells her.

That leaves Igor (Yura Borisov), a balding, black-tracksuited Russian who resents when people call him a gopnik. Stone-faced and soft-spoken, Igor emerges as the anti-Ivan, a guy who drives his grandmother's car and tries his best to be polite and supportive. He also treats Ani like a regular human being instead of an object or a criminal, and despite her justified disgust and hatred of him as her attacker (she calls him a "faggot-ass bitch" with "rape eyes"), they form a reluctant camaraderie as two normal people facing an absurd and extraordinary encounter with the force of extreme wealth.

That normalcy is what Ani finds both repulsive and begrudgingly comforting about Igor, who represents the mundane Brighton Beach milieu she wants to escape, as much as Ivan symbolizes the sweet life she aspires to join. Igor's a real person, and she wants to live in dreams — she fantasizes about honeymooning at Disney World, literalizing her own Cinderella story. It isn't until the final scene, in which an attempt at regaining control over herself ends in painful tears, that she finally wakes up and realizes she's back where she started.

I have seen it suggested that the structure of Anora, putting its protagonist in a dream life only to pull her out of it forcefully, is Baker's way of denigrating and shaming sex workers. I disagree. Baker shames the system they have to make a living in by showing us the reality of their status and conditions. I have seen Anora twice, first in a packed press and industry screening at the New York Film Festival, in which the audience reacted wildly, cheering at every profane clapback and slapstick incident. Yet a second viewing, in a much emptier room, reveals a darker film, one immersed in the agony of remaining stuck in the loveless place society has put you, selling yourself to survive.

New Times first viewed this film at the 62nd New York Film Festival.

Anora. Starring Mikey Madison, Mark Eydelshteyn, Yura Borisov, Karren Karagulian, and Vache Tovmasyan. Written and directed by Sean Baker. 139 minutes. Rated R. In limited release, opens nationwide Friday, November 1; check for showtimes at miaminewtimes.com/miami/movietimes.