Sean Baker's Anora Is a Riotous Celebration of Working-Class Life
It's Pretty Woman for the modern age, and one of the best movies of the year.
Just a few minutes into Anora, there's a small but telling detail in a small but important moment: The movie starts in a strip club, with a montage of incidents in which Anora, one of the club's dancers, picks up clients for private sessions.
You can see she's good at it—at handling them, at dealing with their different ages and circumstances, and at getting them to fork over money, to buy what she's selling. It's just a sales job, really, and she's good at the work. And in this movie's worldview, it really is just work.
So when the film's first pivotal moment comes—a man at the club is asking for a dancer who speaks Russian—it happens in a break room, the sort of unassuming, back-of-the-house space, with lockers on the wall and coworkers getting ready for their shifts, one found in so many working-class, service sector workplaces. And Anora is sitting on a bench eating from a Tupperware container.
Written and directed by Sean Baker, the filmmaker behind Red Rocket and The Florida Project, among other movies, Anora is a movie about working-class life, the comedy and tragedy at the margins of American life. It's shot through with this sort of subtle juxtaposition—of moneyed glamor with working-class reality, of the pull of money and the ways that almost every interaction also involves some sort of transaction, of the workaday reality of labor and the ways workers must contort themselves, sometimes literally, for their wealthy benefactors. Yes, the movie gestures loosely left-leaning concerns about capitalism and exploitation, but mostly it's about the dignity of work and the courage of self-reliance. It's a joyous, sad, messy, chaotic, sprawling, anything-goes romp through a very particular part of the American scene, and it's one of the best movies of the year.
At heart, Anora is just a grittier, funnier, more screwball update on Pretty Woman, complete with a parallel negotiation scene in which a rich benefactor offers the title character a big payday for a week of exclusivity and a negotiation ensues. It turns out their entire relationship is a negotiation.
In this film, however, the benefactor is not Richard Gere's handsome older businessman, but a boy named Ivan, the messy-haired young son of an imposing Russian oligarch. Ivan is just 21, while Anora is 23—a small but important gap, as Anora is truly an adult, living and surviving on her own, while Ivan's lavish lifestyle is bankrolled by his distant, wealthy father. That unchecked lifestyle proves intoxicating, sometimes literally, and the first 45 minutes of the movie carries Anora into Ivan's unchecked world of mansions, private planes, hotel suites, parties, drugs, and carefree living. In the middle of it, Ivan decides, on a whim in Las Vegas, to ask her to marry him. They become legally husband and wife.
It's in this moment that the movie takes its big turn, for in marrying Ivan, Anora becomes something more than a well-paid companion, another compliant staffer in his family's employ. She becomes part of the family, someone to whom the family might have a real obligation. And when the family finds out, they aren't happy.
Ivan's father sends a trio of minders to have the marriage annulled. Ivan, however, bolts from the scene, and the movie's extended middle section turns into a quest between Anora and the three minders to find him.
This section is the heart of the movie, and in the hands of a lesser director, it might have been dull or even difficult to watch. It starts with Anora being physically assaulted, and then effectively kidnapped as the minders need her help to find Ivan. But Baker is both a humanist and a humorist, and he brings a madcap, almost screwball sense of comedy to their interplay, one that somehow doesn't gloss over the more tragic and difficult realities this quartet of workers face.
Anora is gritty, rough, laced with drugs and sex and nudity, but it's not a grim downer. Especially in the middle act, it's exuberant and surprisingly funny. Its vision of working-class life isn't one of bleak and soul-crushing drudgery, but of comic incident and culture clash, of generational conflict and bureaucratic complication. Life is funny and strange and frustrating and infuriating, but it's always worth living, mostly because people are funny and strange and frustrating and infuriating. Baker is the most human, most humane filmmaker working today.
Anora is too blunt about the world's indignities to deliver the happy ending of Pretty Woman's princess fantasy. In the end, the dream doesn't always work out. But people go on with their lives anyway, because their lives have value, dignity, and meaning, and they all deserve our respect. It's a movie that insists that life, however hard, is always worth living. And Anora, meanwhile, is very much worth seeing.
