Cinderella has her glass slipper, Vivian—of the 1990 film “Pretty Woman”—has her blonde bob wig, and Anora, the titular character of the newest rags-to-riches “love” story, has her Juul. Sean Baker’s film “Anora” draws on the centuries-old legends of Galatea and Cinderella, trading in the tired images of Prince Charming and his low-class damsel-in-distress for neon lights and mink fur coats; with a sharp contrast to these traditional tales, Baker eschews antiquated and romanticized tropes in favor of gritty authenticity. In the world of “Anora,” fairytale endings are replaced by a harsh yet human reality that clashes with the pastel purple and iridescent sheen of the film’s color grading. Baker uses this contrast to critique the insidious capitalist structures that push people across the world to sex work and reflect the duality of the profession’s portrayal in the media.
[SPOILERS AHEAD]
Mikey Madison plays the eponymous sex worker Anora “Ani” Mikheeva, who is employed as an exotic dancer at a strip club in Manhattan. Ani has a chance encounter with Ivan “Vanya” Zakharov, the young, wild and rich son of a Russian oligarch. After a night replete with broken Russian, lap dances and THC, Vanya asks Ani to be his “horny girlfriend” for a week (à la “Pretty Woman”), offering her $15,000 for her services. The arrangement works a little too well, with the pair getting married in an impromptu Las Vegas ceremony. Fearing his parents’ wrath over sullying the family’s name by marrying someone deemed below his status, Vanya flees from the mansion he shares with Ani, leaving her behind in a very childish and—in Ani’s words—“unmanly manner.” After suffering bondage and assault at the hands of hired Eastern European goons working for Vanya’s father, Ani joins the men who bound and gagged her as they scramble to find her runaway groom. The plot spirals into a dark screwball comedy, with Ani eventually being forced to get her marriage to Vanya annulled in exchange for a lump sum of money from her disapproving in-laws. After a fiery departure from the marriage law office and Vanya’s family, Ani returns home with one of the aforementioned hired goons. In the last 10 minutes of the film, Baker’s auteurist signature is emphasized by an ending which, similar to his other works, kills the laughter previously filling the theater and uncomfortably brings moviegoers back to grim reality.
For the first half of the film, “Anora” is a sensuous whirlwind of vivid LED lights, flashing hair tinsel and bare flesh, drawing the audience into the age-old rags-to-riches fantasy. Similarly, Ani lounges in satin bed sheets, stuns at bacchanalian parties and jet-sets with her new beau, letting herself fall into the façade alongside theatergoers. Although several Letterboxd reviewers and accredited critics have called out this portion of the film for sticking to tropes and depicting Ani as a gullible, love-sick bimbo, this reading of the narrative is reductive and incongruous with Baker’s empathetic treatment of sex workers across his filmography (e.g. “Tangerine,” “The Florida Project” and “Red Rocket”). Baker, instead, intends to use Ani as a microcosm for the larger phenomenon of “hopeless optimism,” as e-flux writer Aaron Schuester puts it in his review of “Anora,” harking back to the Francis Bacon quote: “You can be optimistic and totally without hope.”
“Anora,” dealing with very similar themes and material, is somewhat of a spiritual foil to the 1990 film “Pretty Woman.” Vivian, the heroine of “Pretty Woman,” follows the standard Pygmalion and Galatea format. After being hired off the streets of Los Angeles by a crooked yet wealthy finance tycoon, Vivian undergoes a drastic makeover from low-brow prostitute to refined lady and is rewarded by the rich man’s hand in marriage. In this modern adaptation of the ancient story, the down-on-her-luck sex worker is regarded as a product to be molded and sculpted to perfection; like Cinderella, Vivian’s internal goodness shines through her initially unkempt appearance, and she melts the cold, capital-driven heart of the Prince Charming that saves her (she drives her love interest to invest in businesses instead of speculating on their downfall). “Pretty Woman” is a fantasy film, a tour de force of the American dream. The success story Vivian lives through is more than unlikely, and she must first undergo a complete metamorphosis to be seen as valuable in the eyes of the patriarchy and of the upper class. Once Vivian’s inner goodness shines through to her exterior—and she has the support of a wealthy man at her side—she is finally ready to be accepted into polite society.
Baker’s film, on the other hand, does away with these illusions. From the moment we are introduced to the serial vaper and vapid billionaire Vanya, it is clear that he disregards Ani as a person, though he is initially kind to her. Amidst the unsatisfying (for Ani, of course) sex and silent time spent with Ani watching Vanya play video games on his couch, the pair do not have any real or meaningful interactions. Throughout the course of the film, Vanya is further proven to be not only devoid of any feelings for Ani but morally bankrupt on the whole. Even the name he is called throughout the movie’s runtime, “Vanya,” is the childish diminutive of the name Ivan and a symbol for his immature and unempathetic view of Ani. Vanya the man-boy is constantly compared to a child and treats Ani like one of the action figures that he uses and discards in his bedroom offscreen. Once Galina and Nikolai, Vanya’s parents, are introduced, this detached inhumanity is made all the more clear. Ani is viewed first as a sexpot whose only purpose is to provide companionship and physical pleasure and second as a roadblock to be disposed of with money and brute force.
However, unlike Vivian’s class-defying transfiguration, Ani remains the same defiant woman throughout the entire film, loudly asserting herself and her right to a better future (which is, ostensibly, what Vanya and his wealth represent). Ani neither lives the class-fantasy spoon fed audiences by “Pretty Woman,” nor does she get the “eat the rich” ending that has been popularized in recent years by films such as “Triangle of Sadness” or “The Menu.” Ani’s “hopeless optimism” lies in her relentless ability to be herself despite her circumstances. Where previous films have protagonists whom audiences empathize with in spite of their position as sex workers, Baker works to destigmatize sex work itself and emphasize the personhood of those in the industry without over-glamorizing the profession itself. Baker’s Ani is not perfectly good, nor teflon strong; she is human. Consistently human.