Mikey Madison in Anora

Sean Baker’s latest film, Anora, is drawing a lot of comparisons to Pretty Woman, and it’s easy to see why. That film is about a sex worker and a rich man falling (somewhat improbably) in love, a Cinderella story dressed up with contemporary wit. Anora is also about a sex worker who falls (somewhat improbably) in love with a rich man, but that is where the comparison ends. 

Anora is centered on Ani (a sublime Mikey Madison), a Brooklyn sex worker who elopes to Vegas with Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), the impetuous son of a Russian oligarch. Pretty Woman’s Edward Lewis is a grown ass man, earning his own fortune and master of his own destiny. It is Edward’s power that makes his union with the convivial Vivian at all possible—he has the social and financial clout to brute force his lower-class love into society. 

Vanya, however, is the son of a rich man, living off daddy’s money, with no social or financial capital of his own. This makes Ani not the new Vivian, but just another woman trying to scrape together a living in a world inherently hostile to her, pinning her hopes on a man—boy—who is incapable of taking care of her, let alone truly caring for her. Ani is at first skeptical of Vanya, but his repeated assurances that he loves her ends with their hasty marriage, which Vanya wants, at least in part if not wholly, because he could get a green card and stay in America, rather return to Russia to work for his distant father, Nikolai (Aleksei Serebryakov). But Nikolai and his wife, Galina (Darya Ekamasova), get wind of the marriage and send a couple of heavies to ensure Ani and Vanya annul their union. 

Baker often features sex workers in his films, and here is his most sympathetic portrayal of the sex work industry yet. Unlike Red Rocket, which centers on a past-his-prime adult film actor so objectively awful you want to launch him into the sun, Anora has Ani, a warm, empathetic presence at the heart of the film. Mikey Madison is wonderful, in turn playful, wistful, and anxiously hopeful, endowing Ani with enough sense to know Vanya probably can’t live up to his promises, but still optimistic enough to go along with his wedding plan and wish for the best. Ani is also witty, sharply striking down exploitative demands from the manager of the club where she dances with a reminder that unless he’s willing to give her insurance and a salary, she’s an independent contractor, not an employee to boss around. Casting non-professional actors to fill smaller roles as Ani’s fellow dancers also adds to the film’s sense of lived-in realism.

But Anora still feels fundamentally voyeuristic and is plagued by the same thematic tourism that shows up in all of Baker’s work. On the one hand, Ani is unashamed of herself and her life choices; on the other hand, she is still beaten up, betrayed, and abandoned, all stereotypes of sex workers in cinema, and despite an effort to endow Ani with agency, ultimately she is just a pawn between Vanya and his more powerful parents. Baker, who writes and directs the film, has compassion for his subjects and a clear desire to depict life among the working and lower classes with a realism and dignity—especially here in Anora, which is so unjudgmental of sex work—not often granted to depictions of poverty in cinema. But he can never quite get away from his own middle-class background; no matter how sympathetic, he is always an outsider peering into these worlds, doubly so here where he is also a man photographing women performing intimate work. 

There is a dissonance in Baker’s work that, at this point, I don’t think can be reconciled. He is drawn to stories about people and worlds in which he is not native, he will always be an outsider representing something he cannot truly understand. But his work is deeply empathetic, and he is one of the only American filmmakers consistently telling stories about people rarely glamorized on the big screen. And Anora is not a bad film, it is a very good film, anchored by a terrific performance from Madison. There will just always be this dissonance in Baker’s work, the gap between his background and that of his subjects. Still, he works to bridge that gap with empathy and understanding, which is more than many filmmakers do. And with Anora, he isn’t interested in a Cinderella story, but in the story of one woman refusing to be shamed for making her way through an inhospitable and inequitable world.

Anora is now playing exclusively in theaters.