Grand Tour
by A.G. Sims
Anora
Dir. Sean Baker, U.S., NEON
In Sean Baker’s films, the idea of America is about as real as a vintage postcard. In many of his movies, the sun picturesquely sets over an America in decline—over Hollywood, over Disney World, over small-town Texas, and in his latest, Anora, over New York’s Brighton Beach, an apt locale to pull back the veil on American mythmaking. The seaside town, which borders Coney Island, looks timeless and mostly unchanged from the eighties, when it became a landing spot for ex-Soviets, which led to the diasporic culture coursing through it today. Brighton Beach was always a mirage, an imperfect recreation of the old country left behind. Within this vaguely Eastern European milieu, Baker sends us off spiraling with Ani (Mikey Madison), an exotic dancer and occasional escort who gets matched one night with the compulsively vaping progeny of a Russian oligarch, dangling the elusive American Dream within her grasp.
The film opens in the lush purple glow of a strip club, where the vibe is routine for the working dancers. Cool girl Ani introduces herself to patrons and makes dancing look effortless and fun. With this, the movie begins its work on the audience, romanticizing the underground club scene and promising something like a feature-length Future music video. She’s the only dancer who understands Russian, so when Ivan (Mark Eidelstein), who goes by Vanya, asks for a private dance, Ani’s paired with him and charmed by his boyish eagerness and willingness to spend. They quickly go from her world to his, a gaudy modern mansion, where they hook up on red satin sheets. He becomes so smitten he pays her to be his “horny girlfriend for the week.” After a blur of house parties, couples’ massages, a trip to the candy store, and a playful beach montage fit for Top Gun, they charter a PJ to Vegas to continue the party. They marry on a whim, and for a second you think this just might work out.
It’s hard to say who’s more swept up by the fantasy: Anora or the audience. In the packed press screening at the New York Film Festival, the crowd was laughing right up to, and hesitantly through, the moment when the tone of the movie changes to something more challenging. Vanya’s parents are furious when they find out about his wedding and order his mob boss-like godfather Toros (Karren Karagulian) to fix it. Toros sends two incapable goons to the mansion, but Vanya runs, leaving a frantic Ani to fend for herself, biting and kicking her captors, who eventually muzzle her and tie her up with a cord. The switch-up is jarring. The home invasion is played as dark comedy, but the sequence stretches past the 25-minute mark, giving ample time for a slow and uncomfortable awareness to take over, implicating the audience in the violence, like Michael Haneke’s fourth wall–breaking moments in Funny Games (1997). The knockoff gangsters finally untie Ani after she “agrees” to annul the marriage for $10,000. She sets out to track down Vanya with them, mostly because she doesn’t have a choice, but also with a conviction that once they find her 20-year-old husband, he’s going to defend their marriage and exact her revenge. His reaction is disappointing to say the least.
Baker positions himself as a socially conscious filmmaker with an artistic curiosity about the stories of marginalized people, which dates back to his earliest films. Since 2012’s Starlet, about an adult film star, he’s trained his gaze on two trans sex workers in Tangerine (2015), a sex working mother and her daughter living in a motel in the shadow of Disney World in The Florida Project (2017), and a predatory former adult male film star in Red Rocket (2021). He has intimated that his next film will be about a sex worker, as well. Baker’s characters talk naturalistically and sometimes improvisationally, pointing to his ambition for authenticity and emotional realism. His screenplays are filled with lightly fictionalized stories he’s heard from people who work in the profession. Baker said in an interview about Tangerine that hardly any of it was fiction, relying mostly on anecdotes from his leads, Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor, about their lived experiences.
The plot and central character journey of Anora will ring a bell for anyone familiar with Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria (1957), about a sex worker living in Rome who keeps finding herself in tragic situations where someone takes advantage of her and devalues her life because of her job. Giulietta Masina won best actress at Cannes for her unforgettable portrayal of Cabiria, a layered and physical performance of hardened self-reliance and protective pride that takes a lifetime to build and a day to shatter. That physicality and emotional complexity is echoed in Madison’s performance of Ani. When Vanya proposes in Vegas, Madison depicts Ani as both experienced enough to recognize that he’s probably full of it and innocent enough to get married anyway. That duality endears us to Ani, her secret desire for a movie miracle becoming inextricable from our own. Based on the loud cheering in the theater when Ani finally gets to tell off Vanya, I can only assume many viewers, in search of some catharsis, would have been okay with a happier ending. But in Baker’s worldview, the possibility of escaping your circumstances is nothing more than American myth.
To say that Anora doesn’t ultimately achieve the profundity of Nights of Cabiria is probably unfair considering that film’s once-in-a-generation power, but recalling that earlier film helps elucidate the deeper ambivalence I feel about Baker’s work. He tends to get a lot of credit for telling stories about people on the margins of society, and his films play out as sincere and well-intentioned, but they’re imbued with an uncomfortable fascination with the streets. He’s looking, but he’s not really saying anything. His films seem to spring from Italian neorealist or French New Wave ethos. Those narratives, which also centered on the poor and disenfranchised, were an indictment of and counterpoint to the Hollywood-influenced national cinemas of those times. And crucially, they were local and personal. Baker’s films, collectively approaching something like a sexploitation genre unto itself, seem to be trying to split the difference between Hollywood and raw grassroots guerilla cinema, landing on a kind of pop realism that feels aesthetically uniquely his, if hollow at the core.
Baker chases Hollywood grandeur with bright colored, frenzied, and frequently funny storytelling that could easily be flipped into Grand Theft Auto side quests. His sex work plots buzz around someone on the hunt, with a deadline creating the feeling of being strapped into a speeding car bracing for some climactic explosion. Deeper truths about America he seems to be confronting are not rooted in the personal and often feel secondary to the lurid hook. So when a washed-up adult film star tries to lure a high school student into the industry, as in Red Rocket, or a trans sex worker’s insecurity about her boyfriend sleeping with a cis woman is turned into a farce, as in Tangerine, or Ani is hogtied in an extended sequence bordering on bondage porn in Anora, the “commentary” feels like more of an afterthought, or maybe even cover, for all the demented fun. Film doesn’t have to be dogmatically political and aesthetically "real" to have impact, but if his goal is ultimately to normalize and decriminalize sex work, as he’s claimed, simply putting sex workers on screen and weaving energetic stories around the most salacious aspects of their lives doesn’t quite land.
I’m reminded of the subplot in Red Rocket about a character accused of stolen valor for impersonating a war veteran at the mall, the line of inquiry drawing attention to the exaggerated heroics of the exploitative protagonist, who has received numerous adult film awards for the work of the women he shared intimate scenes with. Whatever weird clout Baker receives for the niche he’s carved out will ultimately be made more palatable by the integrity of the roles he creates and the brilliance of the actors who inhabit them. In the end, Anora eschews any optimism, instead choosing to convey a bleak reality about American life, but it still just feels like tourism.