Anora Is a Great Film Stapled to a Mediocre Film

The first half is a brilliant skewering of sex work myths. After that…

Sean Baker’s Anora sets out to be a kind of anti Pretty Woman, undermining the sex worker Cinderella myth by demonstrating just how much the rich suck and just how vicious, disempowering, and inexorable the stigma against sex workers can be. The lead performance by Mikey Madison as Anora is incandescent.

But while Madison is entirely able and willing to embrace the movie’s bleak insights, the script wavers. This is especially the case at the end, when, despite itself, Anora coughs up a late-blooming Prince Charming to palliate male viewers, or rom com genre tropes, or both.

The movie opens with a sleazy series of bangs. We follow Anora (or Ani) as she works a tight leather dress and a string of clients in a New York strip club. Her boss calls her over to handle a young, ectomorphic wealthy scion, Vanya Zakharov (Mark Eydelshteyn). He quickly escalates from lap dances, hiring Ani as a full service sex worker for a night, and then for a whole week, of debauchery.

Vanya takes Ani and a bunch of friends on his private plane to Vegas, where he proposes to Ani, half out of lust, half out of a desire to become an American and get out from under the thumb of his controlling parents, and maybe a smidgen out of love. Ani agrees (three quarters for cash, maybe 25% for romance), and looks forward to her happy ever after.

Unfortunately, those controlling, wealthy parents have a lot of resources to throw at annulling this inconvenient and humiliating marriage. When their henchstooges show up, Vanya runs, leaving Ani to be restrained, tied up, humiliated and marched across New York by bumbling Armenian toadies, as they search for Vanya so they can drag him before a judge and call the whole thing off.

The film draws much of its power from the way that it refuses a lot of stereotypes of sex work—both negative and positive. Ani isn’t broken or uniquely exploited; she’s poor, and sex work is a way to make a fair amount of money.

The job isn’t presented as especially glamorous or fulfilling either, though. Ani in the strip club is a worker working, not a self-actualized goddess. There’s a lovely scene where she is dancing for some guy, and leans back to signal to a friend, also dancing for a guy, that she is about ready for a cigarette break. Sex work for Ani is work, with the usual downsides you expect from work—shitty coworkers, shitty health insurance, shitty clients.

The downsides extend to Ani’s relationship with Vanya, even before his parents show up. In Pretty Woman, Julia Roberts is swept off her feet by Richard Gere not just because of his money, but because he’s suave, cultured, (at least intermittently) gracious, and hot stuff in bed.

Vanya, on the other hand, is a stunted spoiled dipshit. He’s fun and sometimes sweet, but even when things are going well, and at his best, he’s a bumbling self-absorbed cad. His bedroom technique is to blast away as fast as he can; Ani is obviously bored when he’s going at it. In desperation she tries to give him some pointers to get him to pay minimally more attention to her pleasure (and for that matter to his own.)

She’s even more underwhelmed by his obsession with video games; he likes to play while she’s draped across him. In one very funny scene, she has to remind him that he’s paid for a whole hour, and could be fucking her instead of fucking with his stupid game.

The film could have let this tension simmer, and given Ani, and the viewers, a chance to explore her investments, compromises, expectations, and disappointments. Instead, though, it turns the wheel towards genre hijinks. The Tarantino-esque heavies show up and bumble about; Ani gets to break one guy’s nose and bite another, demonstrating her fiery, etc. etc.

This section of the film isn’t bad exactly. It just seems too deliberately designed to put Ani aside as the Armenians wander all over New York looking for Vanya, making speeches about kids these days, breaking up a candy store, vomiting in the car. They’re colorful gangsters doing colorful gangster stuff. All of which feels clichéd and rote next to the nuance and determined honesty of Madison’s performance.

Also rote is the odd, unnecessary effort to rescue rom com dynamics as Ani’s relationship with Vanya disintegrates. One of the muscle fixers, Igor (Yuriy Borisov), is more and more taken with Ani. He tries to intercede for her and to court her in small ways and then in larger ones, undeterred by her (understandable!) antipathy to the guy who kidnapped her and is helping to destroy her marriage.

The second half of the film half-sidelines Ani and becomes, in a lot of ways, Igor’s film. The romcom tropes dictate that you start to root for him with all his shy glances and obvious heart-on-sleeve vulnerability as the banter between him and Ani takes on the enemies-to-lovers arc. Worse, Ani ends up reciprocating, at least to some degree. It's like Sean Baker just couldn’t stomach his movie’s low key disillusionment with romance in general and men in particular. “See!” he shouts at the end. “See! See! We’re not all like Vanya! There are good guys out there! Hooray!”

Lots of sex workers do have fulfilling romantic relationships; I’m not opposed to showing that on screen. (In fact, one of my all-time favorite romance novels is about a sex worker.) But the relationship here seems like a distraction from the film’s (admirable) commitments and themes. This is not, or should not be, a movie with a male protagonist sweeping in at the end. It shouldn’t be a film where the female protagonist gets lost for some 45 minutes in a long set piece of schtick. For sixty minutes or so, Anora is a funny, incisive, brutal film about sex work and the unscalable barriers of class, gender, and prejudice. Unfortunately, once that hour is over, you’ve still got another not-bad-but-very-much-not-great 80 minutes to go.