In a plutocracy, it isn’t just the wealthy but wealth itself that rules. This is both because the wealthy are themselves controlled—perhaps more than anyone else—by their money, and because even in the places where the wealthy do not exert direct control, money does. Money seeps into every crack and breaches every barrier, eventually inundating the structures we thought were secure: intimate relationships, sacred spaces, our deepest hopes and desires.
Sean Baker’s films tend to focus on the effects of a society saturated with, and divided by, money on those who don’t have it—especially sex workers, who, lacking any better alternative, sell themselves. In his latest film, Anora, the eponymous main character is a stripper who goes by “Ani” for short. Ani becomes first the paid consort and then, after a spur-of-the-moment proposal, the wife of Ivan Zakharov, the do-nothing son of Russian oligarchs, who are dead-set against the marriage. For Ani, brash, self-assured, and filled out with a thick Brooklyn accent by rising star Mikey Madison, Ivan is a ticket out of a hardscrabble life dancing for lonely men and out of a cramped Brighton Beach apartment just a few feet away from the elevated train.
Anora, which won the Palme D’Or at this year’s Cannes film festival, opens on an ordinary night at Ani’s club, Headquarters, or HQ, where we follow her around as she circulates expertly, scoping out and luring potential clients, escorting them into and out of private rooms, giving lap dances, and vaping prodigiously. Baker, who says his work is influenced by Italian neorealism and British social realism, shoots in real locations and often uses locals as extras and supporting actors. HQ is a real club in Hell’s Kitchen, and the cast lived in Brighton Beach during the production.
Baker’s interest in sex work is more about the work than the sex, though there’s plenty of the latter too. Like any other workers, the strippers at HQ gossip about their clients, communicate wordlessly to each other on the job, squabble over shared tips and boyfriends, eat their food out of tupperware, and complain to their bosses about their benefits or lack thereof. Baker has said that he’s drawn to the world of sex workers—it figures in almost all his movies—in part because he wants to “destigmatize” it. He believes sex work should be “decriminalized and not in any way regulated, because it’s a sex worker’s body and it’s up to them to decide how they will use it in their livelihood.”
But Baker’s films certainly don’t destigmatize sex work by making it look like attractive. It’s typically a last resort for characters in bad circumstances, and they are always looking for ways to break free from it, usually fantastical ones. More often than not these fantasies do damage to themselves and those around them. In Baker’s 2021 film Red Rocket, Mikey Saber, a former porn star who’s now broke, returns home to a small town outside Galveston, where he hatches a deranged plan to exploit a teenaged donut-shop clerk for his own fame and fortune.
More than destigmatizing sex work, Baker’s movies tend to stigmatize work itself. It is a cliché to say that capitalism makes us all prostitutes of one kind or another, reifying and distorting our personalities and abilities to make them marketable. But that doesn’t mean there’s not some truth to it, and sex workers are a stark image of the damage exploitative work can do to people, especially when the humiliations of self-sale are not even compensated with a decent wage and basic health care.
Deprived of security, workers in Baker’s movies are compensated with an image of wealth—the dream of making it big. Ani comes much closer than other Baker characters to realizing that image (which may account for the way the film has broken through). Because Ani speaks passable Russian, which she learned from her immigrant grandmother, HQ’s manager insists that she entertain Ivan, who, at twenty-one, is one of only a few clients younger than she is. A baby-faced hedonist with a devil-may-care charm and amusingly imperfect grasp of English, Ivan is immediately taken with Ani. The first time he pays her for sex he does a backflip onto the bed. He soon offers her $15,000 to drop everything and be his “horny girlfriend” for a week.
Ostensibly studying in the United States, Ivan, also known as “Vanya,” spends his time partying and playing video games in his parents’ Brighton Beach mansion before he has to return to Russia to work for his father’s company. He is Richie Rich left home alone. The home, a real mansion near Brighton Beach formerly owned by an actual Russian oligarch—Vladimir Putin’s judo partner, no less—is an apt environment. All marble and glass, designed with generic decadence, it is money in architectural form and perfectly suits Ivan’s image of America as a playground where everything is for sale and nothing matters, certainly not morality or his parents’ expectations. A “taste of Miami on Jamaica Bay,” as one real estate website describes it.
But it’s neither Miami nor New York that best encapsulates the superficial excess of unrestrained American consumption and the false promises it offers as meager consolation to those on the bottom. When one of Ivan’s retinue of Russian twenty-somethings mentions that the best ketamine she ever had was in Las Vegas, Ivan charters a jet and they’re there, taking over a multilevel luxury suite and living out the American dream weekend: champagne, hot tubs, Black Jack, cocaine (and room-service IV drips for the morning after).
Las Vegas takes on the role Disney World played in Baker’s 2017 movie The Florida Project (Disney World’s code name during its construction). There, for Moonee, the child of a single mother who turns to prostitution after she loses her job and welfare, Disney World represents an escape from foster care. For Ani, the promise of escape is equally temporary and illusory. But when Ivan proposes marriage, for no other good reason than that they’re in Vegas, it’s a gamble she can’t afford to turn down. Ivan is fun and sweet; Ani has little to lose and untold millions to gain. “You hit the lotto, bitch!” a coworker exclaims when Ani quits the strip club upon their return. Baker does a good job of bringing us along for the ride: we know it’s a mistake, but we want to see Ani established in her magic kingdom as much as she does.
Problems emerge quickly. Rumors about the marriage circulate on Russian social media, and Ivan’s mother puts the Zakharov money into action. To get the marriage annulled, she enlists the family’s lackeys: Igor, Garnick, and their ringleader Toros, who doubles as an Orthodox priest and abandons a christening to put an end to Ani and Ivan’s fun. The movie takes a screwball turn at this point: Ivan leaves as soon as he hears his parents are arriving by private jet, and Ani is left to deal with the three stooges alone. An altercation, where Ani gives better than she gets, is followed by a wild goose chase through Brighton Beach and Manhattan hotspots on the trail of Ivan, who has gone on a bender. All four lower-class characters are subject to the whims of Ivan and his parents, who control proceedings from a distance. That Toros and Garnick are Armenian adds a hint of historical exploitation to their servility.
In one meaningful scene, Toros berates a group of young revelers at a late-night diner who shrug off his requests to look at a photo of Ivan. “You know what, I’m so sick of your generation, man. I mean, look at you—no respect for elder, no respect for authority, no goals.... The only goal you have is just to buy a pair of cool sneakers.” Absurdly, an Orthodox priest on the payroll of oligarchs and trying break up a marriage between their indolent son and a stripper is lecturing young people about their consumerism and lack of respect. In a society where money has thoroughly taken over all values, including those of supposed men of God, the expectation that the young should pursue virtue can only play as a pathetic joke.
But Ani, despite her own materialism, does come to stand for a certain kind of virtue—a kind recognized by Igor, the least of the stooges, whom she insults, shuns, and bites over the course of their search for Ivan. After she is resoundingly rejected by Ivan’s parents and Ivan meekly submits to their demands in every detail, Igor turns into Ani’s dime-store knight in shining armor. He insists that Ivan apologize, demanding some dignity for her amid the humiliation. After it’s all over, he asks her about the meaning of her name, Anora. “In America we don’t care about that kind of stuff,” she responds. “We don’t give meaning to names—it’s not a thing.” It turns out it’s an Uzbek name (which may add to the Zakharovs’ disapproval) and it means, “pomegranate fruit, light, and bright,” as Igor discovers on Google. Though Igor doesn’t mention it, it also means honor.
Being honorable is, of course, different from receiving honors. The Zakharovs buy their honors, just as they buy the loyalty of their many servants. But, as Igor recognizes, this doesn’t make them honorable. Though she seeks the kind of honors that, in America at least, are available only to those with money, Ani is worthy of a kind of honor that still—even in a plutocratic society—cannot be bought or sold. Warped by her experiences, Ani tries to compensate Igor for the honor he shows her, only to realize her error in the film’s final moments.
Anora is not without its flaws. The demands of a diverting plot and Baker’s political aims overwhelm the development of the characters and hamper the film’s attempts at social realism. The best examples of that genre—like Vittoria De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves—don’t moralize, and they don’t have to work so hard to elevate the protagonists over their circumstances. Still, few filmmakers capture, as Baker does, the full scope of the degradation caused by the unchecked pursuit of wealth. It doesn’t just wreak havoc on our material lives and suppress our sense of justice; it also stunts our imagination and deforms our very sense of self.
