Sex work drama Anora is popular for a reason, but scenes played for laughs are actually horrific

There’s no mystery as to why Sean Baker’s Anora has wowed critics and audiences. The Palme d’Or winner from this year’s Cannes Film Festival is a phantasmagorical journey into a long New York night, as Anora (Mikey Madison) has been forced to join forces with her new husband’s keepers to secure his location after he runs away from their new marital home. Just a few short months earlier, Anora and Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn) met at the strip club she works at and fell in love. After a quickie marriage in Las Vegas, a weak attempt at securing Ivan American citizenship, his parents in Russia find out what he’s done and will do anything it takes to have their marriage annulled.

Baker is no stranger to the world of sex work, with films like Red Rocket and Tangerine rooted in the diverse realm of transactional sex. Through his eyes, the world of labour and sex seem deeply linked to the idea of the American dream (or nightmare). Sex becomes a tool for Americans to change their social stature and have upward mobility within a system that offers increasingly less opportunity to rise in the ranks of success. In a world of stark wealth disparity, sex workers become among the handful of people who are able to earn enough money within a short period of time to literally change their class status. As his films show, though, that often comes at a price.

The same way that 19th century aristocrats rolled their eyes at the nouveau riche who built their fortunes through industry, sex workers remain on the peripheries of society, despite the fact that theoretically their newly accrued wealth can buy them into a new social class. Yet, the comparison ends there; the vulnerability of sex workers means that they’re far more likely to be subjected to casual violence. The fact that they work with their bodies makes them susceptible to disproportionate and targeted attacks. If they used to burn factories, here they burn bodies. Sex work becomes a handy metaphor for a system where all relationships and interactions are reduced to transaction. But, integrally, sex work isn’t merely metaphor. For many people, it’s reality.

The underlying violence that Anora has to continually negotiate makes the film tense and even, at times, unbearable. In large part due to Mikey Madison’s star-making performance, the film has been painted as a kind of lighthearted Uncut Gems. The two films share a similar desperate energy and the looming threat of the morning light. They’re both set in the seedier corners of New York City and follow characters with a gambling spirit, obsessed with the big win. Yet, despite Howard being pursued by literal thugs in Uncut Gems, there’s something far more immediate about the threat that Anora experiences. Despite her captor’s sympathy for her plight, to the point where they understand better than she does that when it comes to social class, despite her new marriage, she “belongs” in the trenches with them and not in the high castle, they represent a tangible threat to her wellbeing that transcends anything Howard ever faced in the Safdies film.

That threat looms through all of Anora’s interactions with the Zakharov family. Her body and her company can be bought, but the underlying expectation is that she can be disposed of just as equally. This isn’t a metaphor either — her body as the tool of her labour, becomes fair game for violence. If the film was ever meant to feel like a sweeping love story, it never escapes the stigma that Anora faces. For audiences describing the pleasure of the film, it seems lost on me. Though the film does seem to channel a kind of screwball comedy energy, it’s unbearably cynical and offers no reprieve or tangible escape for Anora. Scenes that are played for laughs feel unbearably horrific if you take more than a few seconds to think about them. She’s vibrant and young and industrious, and the film seems to suggest her life will never get better. For all our love for Anora as a character, she emerges as a loser. Life isn’t fair and she escapes with her dignity but the film leaves a sour, bitter taste that lingers long after the pleasure dies down.

The experience of watching Anora, therefore, inspires a kind of whiplash. There are moments of intense pleasure. Sean Baker knows how to craft a scene and the cast is impeccable. Mikey Madison is an undeniable star. Karren Karagulian and Yuriy Borisov, as her captors, are also standouts. The movie seems to have a lot to say about the nature and hierarchies of labour, but little push to dismantle them. The movie is too ostentatious to take it as purely an observational critique of worldwide capitalism run amok, so the overall impact has a kind of solemn emptiness that feels like a capitulation to power more than anything else. ■

Anora is currently playing in Montreal theatres.

Anora (directed by Sean Baker)

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