Anora: Transactional love and the comedic framing of violence against sex workers

Yesterday marked the 97th Academy Awards ceremony, and, unsurprisingly, Anora took home the award for Best Picture. Earlier this year, the movie won the prestigious Palme d’Or at Cannes and earned numerous other nominations at various awards shows. Since its highly anticipated release last October, Sean Baker’s (Tangerine, The Florida Project) fifth feature film has received seemingly endless praise.

Starring Mikey Madison and Mark Eydelshteyn, Anora is the story of Ani, a 23-year-old exotic dancer and sex worker from Brooklyn, who agrees to marry Ivan, a wealthy 21-year-old client and Russian oligarch heir. However, Ani and Ivan’s whirlwind romance quickly sours when his parents learn of their marriage. They send their henchmen to deal with the situation as swiftly as possible—that is, to ensure no one finds out about their son’s marriage to a sex worker in the hopes of annulling the marriage quickly.

Several aspects of Anora worked beautifully, such as Drew Daniel’s cinematography and hairstylist Justine Sierakowski’s near-esoteric creative use of hair glitter, not to mention Madison’s electrifying performance, which earned her Best Actress. This interview gives you an idea of the amount of work and depth of exploration that brought Ani to life, the driving force behind her humanity. Unfortunately, Madison’s capable and earnest performance is cheapened by Baker’s script, which is clumsy at its best and downright dehumanizing at its worst.

Warning: The rest of this article contains spoilers.

I swear I wasn’t laughing

Anora relies on numerous comedic tropes, including slapstick , dark humour , and screwball comedy . It features recurring physical violence, outrageous and explosive dialogue, absurd plot devices, chaos, controversial themes, and an emphasis on class disparity, among other issues (Bruns, 2020).

From the moment Ivan’s family’s henchmen—Garnick, Igor, and Toros—are introduced, accompanied by his godfather, Ani is held captive, brutalized, bound, and mocked. Baker seems particularly uninterested in condemning class contempt or misogynistic violence this early on in the film—or by the end of it, if we’re being honest—as the script strives to be as apolitical as possible.

“She’s out of control, she’s an animal.”

– Garnick about Ani, being held captive against her will

As a result, audiences are left powerless, forced to look on as Ani endures relentless humiliation and is repeatedly subjected to being called names like “hooker,” “prostitute,” “whore,” while Ivan flees from his parents’ henchmen. This conflict ultimately fuels the humour at the heart of Anora: bumbling, inept henchmen struggling to control the untameable Ani while hunting for Ivan, who is on the run. The pursuit devolves into absurdity and chaos.

In one particularly troubling scene, Ani strategically screams “Rape! Rape! Rape!” at the top of her lungs in an attempt to rattle her attackers. The shot cuts away abruptly, and three seconds later, we see a close-up of Ani. She’s gagged, and can’t make a sound. This editing technique is known as a smash cut, and it’s generally used for comedic effect.

It worked. The theatre I saw the movie in was packed, and everyone erupted with laughter at this moment, and again at other points throughout the film.

These technical and narrative choices are far from insignificant. Among other things, they undermine the seriousness of Ani’s accusations and, more broadly, the credibility of real incidences of sexual violence against sex workers, who regularly face this threat.

Points for personality and other compensation prizes

I probably could’ve stomached all this slapstick violence a little better if Baker didn’t have his heart set on turning one of these henchmen into a romantic rebound. Played by Yura Borisov, Igor is tasked with watching Ani’s every move and ensuring she cooperates. From the moment he first appears, it’s obvious Baker wants the audience to see him as a thug with a heart of gold. Clumsy yet considerate, Igor appears to be the only man in the movie that possesses an ounce of interest in Ani’s well-being (the bare minimum, in other words). He’s cold, but opposed to mistreating her, which sets him apart from the rest of the brutes she faces. The more she despises him, the gentler he becomes. Not all men, after all.

This entirely useless narrative arc culminates in Anora’s final scene: Igor and Ani are seated in a parked car in front of her apartment, getting ready to part ways. What follows is an unnecessary and purely transactional sex scene. The sex is initiated by Ani and is impossible to interpret in any other way other than as her thanking Igor for his kindness.

When Igor tries to kiss her, Ani resists, and breaks down in tears.

At that moment, everything becomes clear: Baker has decided to end Anora by pitying his protagonist and encouraging audiences to see her as a woman seemingly incapable of connecting with others without resorting to sex. Sigh.

As one Letterboxd user put it: “As someone who has actually done sex work in NYC before, I was deeply disappointed in Baker’s treatment of Anora. In the film, the distinction between Anora’s work and personal lives is blurred to the point where it’s nonexistent.”

How is it that Sean Baker, an independent filmmaker who has devoted much of his career to telling the stories of sex workers, fumble so hard? Why do we see Madison’s breasts seven times in the first 20 minutes of the movie? Is objectification necessary to critique objectification in a supposedly post-male-gaze era? Why is the subject of sexual violence in Anora almost exclusively treated as a punchline and reduced to multiple (yes, multiple!) “edgy” jokes? Why do we continue to award male filmmakers who take it upon themselves to tell women’s stories in the first place?

For a film named Anora, one thing’s for sure: the movie is fundamentally uninterested in its protagonist’s identity and motivations. Ani exists solely through the lens of her job and is defined by the relationships of the men surrounding her, which promotes harmful and reductive stereotypes not just about sex workers but about women in general.