As someone who has worked as an exotic dancer, I’m a tough critic when it comes to cinematic stripper fare, with my own particular set of credibility metrics. Magic Mike trying to fund a business with rubber-banded stacks of cash? Check. “Closer” by Nine Inch Nails in a pivotal dance scene in the Magic Mike XXL sequel? Check. Baroque manicures in Zola? [Checks nails.] Check. Nomi Malone licking the stripper pole in Showgirls? Two acrylic-tipped thumbs way down. Yikes. Never in a million years.
Now comes writer-director Sean Baker’s Anora, in which the simmering Mikey Madison plays Anora, or Ani, as she prefers to be called, a Brooklyn stripper and sex worker who gets tangled up with Ivan, an adorably capricious man-baby — acted to petulant perfection by Mark Eydelshteyn — who happens to be the son of a Russian oligarch. Ani and Ivan meet at the strip club where she dances. A deal is struck between them (her time for his money), and hijinks ensue. Billed as a kind of cracked Cinderella story, Anora’s cinematic progenitor isn’t so much Pretty Woman as Tony Scott’s True Romance crossed with Martin Scorsese’s After Hours — a rom-dramedy caper hyped up with fisticuffs and gross-out touches.
Prior to the film’s nationwide release, I was cynical about its Palme D’Or win at Cannes, 98 percent Rotten Tomatoes rating, and Oscar buzz. Another dude auteur trying to glom onto sex work cred (see also: Striptease, Exotica)? Try me, brother. But from an early shot inside the club, where Ani is hard at work on what looks like a lap-dance assembly line, I could tell Baker locked in: strip club social dynamics and labor issues, stripper aesthetic and argot, all deftly handled. He nailed every detail, from Ani’s patient smile to her micro thong. And Madison had me at a single word: No.
As the film begins, we see Ani smoothly piloting the waters of the busy club, looking for customers interested in a lap dance or two or 12. She has a few hits, but what pulled me in was the miss — when a customer rebuffs her offer for a dance, Ani raises her eyebrows and says “No?” The fluty upspeak on the “no,” the girly deference that is also a challenge to the man to reconsider, unlocked a core sense-memory deep in my retired hustler bones. I have said — and embodied — that “no” thousands of times.
In the opening minutes, Ani gamely deflects creepy customer questions. She’s sweet, playful, determined, her practiced flirtation and liquid moves showing the mark of a true pro, from the pole work to the classic stripper hair-toss. At the moment the manager summons Ani to dance for a customer (the fate-tilting Ivan), who’d requested a girl who speaks Russian, she is in the dressing room eating food she brought from home. (Some viewers have gone gaga over this mundane detail: Strippers eat from Tupperware! They’re just like us!)
From this moment, you’re rooting for her. I, committed stripper-movie grump, was rooting for her… until we see Ani in the private room with Ivan, giving him a lap dance while chewing gum. In far too many Hollywood depictions of sex workers, gum is used as a lowbrow signifier: “Look at this floozy showing us her animal nature, chewing her gum.” We get it: With the jaw-churning and bubble-cracking, gum represents a deviation from bourgeois comportment. But in real life, the finickiest club managers don’t want you chewing gum when you’re on the floor: A) they think it’s “not classy,” and B) they don’t want your Doublemint stuck in their precious, beer-soaked, glow-in-the-dark carpet. That said, I remembered Ani had just eaten and probably wants to make sure she’s got fresh breath. Pro forma stripper hygiene. All is forgiven.
After Ivan convinces Ani to see him outside of work, she shows up at his garish waterside mansion the next day with eye bags and a bandage dress revealing some bruises on her legs. Here is where I wholly gave over my respect: Even with top-flight makeup artists at the ready to do a coverup job, Baker knew that in order to keep it real, Ani’s body would have to bear these marks — pole hickeys, pole kisses, party bumps, whatever you call ‘em — on her legs and hips. In consulting with working strippers and hiring them as actors on the production, Baker showed that his attention to authenticity was his bond. This small detail proves it. (To illustrate how that dedication was received, at a special sex-worker screening of the movie in September, dancers in the audience clacked their Pleaser heels together in appreciation.)
Anora is about class, about loyalty, and most of all, about two young people testing the limits of their allotted forms of power with gobs of money and a triad of thugs complicating things, at times hilariously. When Ivan’s family finds out that he and Ani wed during a whirlwind trip to Las Vegas, they demand an annulment. A sex worker wife for their failson? Heavens, no! What felt like a Cinderella story at the start is exposed as a Faustian bargain with a sable coat thrown in.
By the time the plotline veers from the club, the authenticity is less about granular sex-work detail and more about the glaring disparities between the “haves” and the “have nots,” with the haves being able to run away (literally) from their problems, and the have-nots being tasked with either cleaning up (also literally) or chasing after them. Fortified by wealth and connections, Ivan can easily move on. But what about Ani?
Stigma is the silent third party in the relationship. Strippers don’t often deal directly with criminalization, but stigma can make treacherous many practical concerns like banking, housing, straight employment, and child custody. Any stripper knows better than to try securing an apartment or a bank loan with “stripper” written in the occupation box on the application. What’s at stake isn’t merely social capital, but your fundamental legitimacy as a citizen, a state that can leave one feeling vulnerable at the very least, and trapped at worst. Small wonder the fantasy of rising above all of that through marrying Ivan — a unicorn customer who’s young, handsome, wealthy, gregarious, and spontaneous — would beckon to the otherwise pragmatic Ani.
In Baker’s acceptance speech for the Palme d’Or, he seized the opportunity to speak about chipping away at the stigma of sex work. He dedicated the award to “all sex workers, past, present and future,” a refreshing tribute after decades of directors and actors racking up shelves of awards from sex-worker stories with no acknowledgement whatsoever. (Fun fact: The first Academy Award for best actress was given in 1928 to Janet Gaynor for her performance in three films, including Street Angel, in which she played a working girl.) Does this make Sean Baker any kind of voice for sex workers? Emphatically, no. But he is an ally, asserting that the work — always controversial, sometimes messy, and never easy — is legitimate. Aspirational? Not for most. But real.
Sex work as proxy for consumerism, reaching for the American Dream™, and/or labor under capitalism are tropes that, like a fictional stripper’s gum, are stretched fairly thin by now: “We are all prostitutes/ Everyone has their price” is a lyric from a song (“We Are All Prostitutes”) by the Pop Group that came out 1979, for heaven’s sake. My sense is that people infatuated with this tinpot Marxist analysis enjoy the rush of feeling like the naughty provocateur without paying any real price for transgression. All talk. No walk. In PR stops and interviews, Baker and his cast at least nod to the fact that the stakes are different in being a stripper than they are for writing a film about, or playing the role of, a stripper.
Critics have been kind to indie king Baker, whose oeuvre includes multiple films in which sex work, of one kind or another, is central. As some have noted, the topical focus does strike in me a weird moralizing twang — What’s up with that? — but so far, the work feels more sincere than sensationalist. I can’t fault him, really. Sex work is a colorful world — no less so than the more trafficked thematic proving grounds of crime and combat.
As a stripper, I became so used to being picked over and appraised in the club, and to petitioning for understanding, for any crumb of respect, outside of it. This time, I am an arbiter of legitimacy. I get to pick and choose, to lavish the coin of admiration and approval at my whim. In courting the participation, validation, and, I’ll go so far as to say it, the esteem of sex workers, Baker made not only a gripping film, he also made a paradigm-shifting one. How nice that for a change, the valuation is reciprocal. Who could say no to that?