Earlier this year, the Cannes Film Festival observed a heroic first: the director who won the Palme d’Or, the event’s highest honor, dedicated the prize to “all sex workers, past, present, and future.” No one familiar with the director, Sean Baker, could have been too surprised. Baker has spent his career—up to and including his Palme-laurelled latest, “Anora,” a comedy about a Brooklyn stripper—chasing American hustlers of every stripe. He became an indie darling with “Starlet” (2012), a drama set in the industrial pornucopia of the San Fernando Valley, and “Tangerine” (2015), a Los Angeles-based buddy comedy about transgender sex workers. From there, Baker ventured east for “The Florida Project” (2017), set at an Orlando day-rate motel where a woman sells sex to support herself and her daughter. Then he veered west again, to Texas City, with “Red Rocket” (2021), about a flailing ex-porn star—a prodigal gigolo—in search of fresh, frisky mischief.
All this cross-country zigzagging, which might have once felt arbitrary and rootless, has come to seem ever more purposeful and even political with time. In focussing on a broad swath of sex workers and their hardscrabble realities—odd hours, gruelling conditions, treacherous pimps, hostile johns, nonexistent benefits, dressing-room squabbles, porn-set performance anxieties—Baker has made the case, in movie after movie, that there is no tougher, more resourceful, and more cruelly stigmatized labor force under the sun. “Anora,” set over several wintry New York days and nights, splendidly renews this argument, even if the sun itself, such a glaring fixture of Baker’s earlier work, is on hiatus. The cinematographer Drew Daniels finds a forlorn beauty in the gray skies over Coney Island, where visitors shiver along the boardwalk, and in the heavy snow that, in a late, lovely scene, blankets a nearby neighborhood. Fortunately, the movie has its own built-in heat supply.
Anora—who goes by Ani, and is played, brilliantly, by Mikey Madison—is a twentysomething exotic dancer at HQ, a Manhattan strip club. The movie begins with Ani and her colleagues at work, each one straddling a customer in a chair. Take That’s “Greatest Day” fills the air, striking a tone of lush, night-of-our-lives romanticism. The men lap it up, but their lust is mocked as well as indulged; the camera, gliding matter-of-factly past a row of swaying hips and bouncing buttocks, could easily be a manager taking inventory.
Ani is one of HQ’s best girls, and Madison plays her with a bawdy effrontery and a disarming grin that seems to widen by a mile under neon lights. Watch and listen as Ani slyly coaxes a patron out of his shell; hearing that he has no bills to tuck into her thong, she playfully offers to escort him to an A.T.M. She’s so good at her job that the movie has to remind us that it is, in fact, a job, and an exhausting one: cut to the next morning, as Ani, wearing shades and a heavy jacket, trudges in steely silence back to her Brooklyn apartment, crawls under the covers, and recharges for another long night ahead.
No wonder the rest of “Anora” plays like a wild dream—first joyous, then catastrophic, and always fiercely unpredictable. Back at HQ, Ani is assigned to Ivan Zakharov (Mark Eydelshteyn), a heedless young pleasure seeker from Russia. Ani is Uzbek American, and though her Russian is serviceable at best, her body language is more than fluent enough for them both. Ivan, for his part, knows just enough English to murmur “God bless America” as Ani slides onto his crotch. He is also rich enough to take their relationship private. Before long, Ani is visiting him at his parents’ mansion in Brighton Beach, which has stunning waterfront views and daily maid service. Who exactly is this privileged little mophead? And who—and where—are mom and dad?
The answers, as with most things involving the Russian oligarchical class, bode well for no one. Eydelshteyn, a supremely nimble clown, makes Ivan the very picture of fuckboy fecklessness. When he first pays Ani for sex—he finishes so fast he doesn’t bother removing his socks—you want her to take the money and run. But the relationship progresses, even if it never deepens. Ani isn’t dumb, and Madison, whose sad eyes often tell a story her smile doesn’t, betrays a silent awareness that something here is too good to be true. Still, Ani is also young and, if not quite in love, then eager to believe in love. She can’t resist Ivan’s horndog enthusiasm, his party-hearty vibes, his obscene fortune. Within days, the two jet off to Vegas by private plane, get hitched, then return to New York to start their new life. It’s over almost before it has begun.
Baker conceived the role of Ani with Mikey Madison in mind, inspired mainly by her work in “Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood” (2019) and “Scream” (2022). In each of those pictures, you might recall with alarm, Madison’s character dies horrifically, doused in blood, set ablaze, and howling in agony. Mercifully, Ani avoids such a fate, though she is bound, gagged, and made to scream bloody murder. Her antagonists are a bumbling trio of toughs, drawn with a sharp eye for the immigrant demographics of Brighton Beach: two Armenian Americans, Toros (Karren Karagulian) and Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan), and a Russian, Igor (Yura Borisov). The men work for Ivan’s parents, and they spring into action once they catch word that the lad has tied the knot with “a prostitute.” The marriage must be annulled, Ivan kept on a leash, and Ani sent packing.
Easier said than done. The centerpiece of “Anora” is an acridly electrifying sequence—a nearly half-hour whirlwind of nose-breaking, furniture-smashing chaos—in which you can feel not just the narrative stakes but the very genre foundations shifting beneath the characters’ feet. Funny games are afoot; the pratfall vibes are part Three Stooges, part “After Hours.” It was surely this sequence that led Greta Gerwig, the Cannes jury president, to invoke Howard Hawks and Ernst Lubitsch. I suppose “Anora” could well be Baker’s “Trouble in Paradise,” if you can imagine Miriam Hopkins kicking Herbert Marshall in the face. But would it be more or less sacrilegious to invoke Preston Sturges, the most class-conscious and marriage-minded of screwball auteurs? Like Sturges, Baker grasps how the clashing priorities of love, sex, money, and status can send an impulsive romance spiralling into matrimonial anarchy.
A contemporary return to screwball tradition is a welcome but challenging proposition, and Baker’s play with the form is hardly seamless. If you manage to see “Anora” in a packed house, listen closely to the audience laughter spilling forth when all hell finally breaks loose: Is it boisterous or nervous? Does it arise in response to, or in spite of, the brutal shenanigans on display? There’s no wrong answer. In setting his characters on a furious collision course, Baker seems bent on pushing realism, humanism, comedy, and action well past the point of formal compatibility. Through it all, I think, he is also trying to negotiate an honest path for his flinty yet vulnerable heroine. He doesn’t want to soft-pedal the danger that someone like Ani could find herself in, but at the same time he wants to make her more agent than victim of chaos. That’s why her bodily control, evident from the first strip-club scene, satisfyingly extends to the art of self-defense. There’s an uglier subgenre of crime movie that “Anora” acknowledges by rejection: the kind where a female sex worker winds up on a slab.
When Ivan takes cowardly flight, the picture becomes ever more ambitious and unwieldy, morphing into a vehicular chase thriller, with three men in desperate pursuit and a sullen, semi-chastened Ani in tow. The manhunt has its monotonous moments, but it’s also where the action comes into moral focus. The movie, having built up a righteous steam of fury, now unleashes it against the Ivans of the world and salutes those toiling thanklessly in their employ. That’s why Baker lingers thoughtfully on the women who arrive at the house every morning to clean up Ivan’s messes—and on the belligerent tow-truck driver who turns up to obstruct the plot but emerges, within seconds, as a harried kindred spirit. In the most comical aside, even Toros is shown to be putting in overtime: by day, he’s a priest.
Such multitasking is a constant in this director’s cinematic universe, which, given its devotion to seeking out various armpits of America, we might as well call Bakersfield. And so it is that “Anora,” by turns a teeming slice of life and a virtuoso farce, reveals itself in the final stretch as a cracked fairy tale. Ani is a strip-club Cinderella, saddled with the froggiest of princes, but she is also granted, in Igor, the unlikeliest of white knights. What passes between Ani and Igor—whom Borisov plays with a gaze calm enough to soothe even this movie’s nightmarish tumult—is a moment of rare and complicated grace, a connection that goes beyond mere transaction. You want it to last forever; you know that it won’t. For both Ani and Igor, it’s back to the grind. ♦
