Anora’s Honor

To the educated middle-class viewer of Sean Baker’s Anora, the term “sex worker” will seem the proper and indeed the only usable one for the titular protagonist’s occupation. Any other would be dated or worse. Yet the term is unknown to the streetwise characters in the film, set in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, not that long ago. In this world, Anora (Mikey Madison) is variously called a whore, prostitute, shlyukha, hooker, escort, ho, and so on.

A contrast is staged for us between, on the one hand, the proper term, which is only used around the film (say, in the press materials and Baker’s Palme d’Or acceptance speech), and, on the other hand, the quasi-Rabelaisian lexicon circulating vigorously in it. This is not Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman or Lizzie Borden’s Working Girls, movies that underscore the work of sex work, drawing out its tedium, exploitation, and attendant labor disputes. Anora is more interested in inhabiting, and reflecting on, the space between the one “right” word and the many other objectionable words for its protagonist’s job—a sign of its relay between art-house and screwball genre film. It’s a comedy about the labor of sex work and the whores who do it, neither conceding nor denying the ground that would make these terms opposites.

Consider the “one” term again: sex work. In addition to its destigmatizing function, it also usefully conjoins two concepts that popular opinion tends to oppose. The pleasure of sex is supposed to sap our energy for work, and the tedium of work to render us too busy or tired for sex. In one respect, the film agrees: the men frequenting Anora’s club are paying for the company of women, who, as if to redress men’s not infrequent sexual complaint, do all the work. However effeminately their crotches are figured as “laps,” these remain laps of luxury. These guys are on a welcome holiday from their jobs and the labor of male sexual initiative.

The gulf between sex and work for the men at the club is writ large in the film’s narrative structure. One of Anora’s clients, Ivan (Mark Eidelstein), the son of a Russian oligarch, starts out as an idle, oversexed party-boy and ends up being repatriated to Russia, where his no longer indulgent father, pausing for maximal effect, dooms him to begin…a job. He’s been disciplined for taking up with Anora, but for her, sex and work aren’t thus separable. She never has sex that isn’t part of her job, and never does anything for a living except provide sexual services. Without pimp or lover—or any social life to speak of—her situation feels anomalous. She is not just a sex worker; she is nothing but one.  

Now consider the “other” terms, the many expressions used to mean sex worker in the film. Two in particular merit attention. The first is “erotic dancer,” which is meant to counter a cruder description, but which we know is only a slightly franker euphemism for an older one: the “exotic dancer,” with her obviously x’d-out “r.” That is why the phrase, with a little help from a vulgar intensifier ubiquitous in this film, still sounds belittling in Ivan’s mouth, when, defending her against the charge that she’s merely a “hooker,” he screams: “she’s a fucking erotic dancer!” “She’s a fucking sex worker” would perhaps be even more effective in reminding us of the old, not to say hoary, tradition of the “working girl” offering “love for sale”—but never on Sunday—in “the world’s oldest profession.”

The second such expression is “night butterfly,” itself exotic if, like us, you didn’t know that it’s a Russian idiom (and it’s funnier if you don’t). This is the turn of phrase that Ivan’s surprisingly unbrutish father chooses for Anora: casually urbane, it measures all the social distance between a man of the world and—a venerable term that such a man, if older, might have chosen instead—a “woman of the world.” But “night butterfly,” with its patent recourse to metaphor, also reminds us that there is no right word for what Anora does, and no word that doesn’t belong to a thesaurus of insult or shame. Not by accident does she adorn her fingernails with butterfly press-ons—“so classy,” says a coworker—as if already channeling the oligarch’s “classy” figure of speech. The drawback of any term that presents itself to the viewer as the proper and even the only word is that it obscures something central to Anora’s existential burden. As Ivan might say if he had a Ph.D. in comparative literature, she is a fucking catachresis, a figure for something without a proper name. This underclass Cinderella’s closet necessarily overflows with slippers because none ever fits.

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We first meet Anora at work, a gentleman’s club called Headquarters, where she goes by Ani. When she meets Ivan there, he asks her to call him Vanya. Another opposition: this time between Ani’s assimilation and Vanya’s ethnic authenticity. Of course, his capital resides not only in his name—bolstered by his father’s regional celebrity—but in his wallet, which he opens up to Ani: after one lap dance and a few quick lays, she’s offered $15,000 to be his girlfriend for the week.

If Vanya is bad at the sex work that is his leisure—he’s too quick, though indubitably exerting himself—Ani excels at the sex work that is her job. This is clear from the film’s opening scene, in which a slow-motion tracking shot meets three lap-dancers at their glitter-streaked waists. The shot basks not in the blissed-out glory of the customers but in the satisfaction of the dancers themselves, a distinction cannily registered on Anora’s face, as the camera moves up from her hips to her slight, knowing smirk: she knows she’s good at this. So are her coworkers, and it’s their assembly-line uniformity, their uncomplicated femininity, offset by the swelling chorus of Take That’s “Greatest Day”—a British pop hit recently performed live at the coronation of King Charles II—that nudges Anora’s opening scene from erotica to camp, from the sublime to the stupid. These affects are never too far apart anyway.

The difference is self-consciousness: camp because you’re in on the joke; stupid because you’re maybe just a little too sober. Just how sober you think Baker is, generating pathos or humor at his subjects’ expense, might determine your appreciation of his movies, the most famous of which feature trans streetwalkers (2015’s Tangerine), a mother in trouble with the Department of Children and Families because she’s selling sex out of her motel room (2017’s The Florida Project), and a retired porn star (2021’s Red Rocket). It’s tempting to claim that Baker, like just about everyone in these characters’ worlds, is exploiting them—that his films are based on the presumption that he, despite his distance and as a function of his power, can know them. It is, however, precisely their knowledge—how self-conscious they are, when and why they let themselves recklessly dream and aspire against the odds—that’s as much Baker’s subject as their work, which he variously, even chaotically, belittles and ennobles.

If Anora’s nickname produces more uniformity in the club—her coworkers include Diamond and Lulu—so does her very uniform: a bandage dress and a small purse tucked under her arm. It’s strange, the purse. We know she has a locker: it’s where she eats dinner out of Tupperware while complaining to her manager about the club’s handsy DJ. But she wields her purse anyway, out on the club’s floor, where she sweet-talks potential customers, escorting them from the ATM to the VIP room. It doesn’t really matter what’s in the purse (lip gloss? cigarettes?); it’s a prop—a blunt reminder of what she’s selling and what she’s there for. Between the cajoling and the lap dances, she’s going to get her bag.

Ani seems almost amused by the men who grab at her waist, palm her ass, and ask, among other things, if her family knows what she does. “Does your family know you’re here?” she replies, no-bullshit, but never quite offending anyone. Her family, it turns out, is largely absent. She lives with her sister in Brighton Beach; her mom lives with “her man” in Miami; and so, she’s a fatherless stripper, but Ani’s Daddy Issues aren’t the classic ones. She’s not desperate for male attention or some surrogate father, she’s desperate to avoid the fate of the abandoned mother. So she’s sharp-tongued and invulnerable, defended against men even as she entices them. These are symptoms of what we might call her Type II Daddy Issues: she’s not looking to fall in love; she’s looking out for herself and her livelihood. It’s all flimsy protection from the marriage plot into which she’s swept when Vanya proposes after his week of the Girlfriend Experience.

Because Ani will fall, if not exactly in love, then at least into vulnerability. First into the hands of Vanya, and then into the arms of Igor (Yura Borisov), a strongman hired by Vanya’s parents who comforts her (whether she likes it or not) after Vanya abandons her. Between Vanya’s hands and Igor’s arms is, improbably, a madcap comedy featuring goonish bodyguards, a Las Vegas wedding, a Coney Island manhunt, and a Russian mother whose actual authority (accessorized with a designer bag) pulls the curtains on Ani’s tough performance. But none of this, exactly, constitutes her humiliation.

Ultimately, the delusion is as much Vanya’s as Anora’s. When his parents learn of his marriage to a shlyukha, they enlist their American proxies—Igor and the Armenian brothers Toros and Garnick—to compel the newlyweds into an annulment. Vanya flees, leaving Anora to contend with the trio in a twenty-five-minute brawl whose slapstick choreography never really throws her safety into doubt. She can defend herself: punching, biting, and kicking as if she were fighting off muggers. And in a way, she is. “Rape!!” she screams when Toros removes her diamond wedding ring. But it’s not her property or bodily autonomy that’s at risk; it’s her conjugality. “This is a real marriage!” she insists. She’s committed to the marital bit, and it’s this credulous commitment that triggers a violent outbreak of her Issues.

Igor, the brawn of the trio, gags her with a scarf and ties her hands behind her back. No doubt the men want peace and quiet, but Igor later tells Anora he subdued her to ensure that she wouldn’t harm herself. Without the ring, she has become a woman on the verge, like her madrilañan cousins in Almodóvar.

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Of course the marriage is dissolved. Anora is given $10,000 to disappear, nominally a “green card fee.” (Her value—and the value of American citizenship—are equally depressed in the economy of oligarchy.) In this conclusion, Baker’s film trades on an old convention in art films about women sex workers: the protagonist is seduced into a dream of marriage from which she is cruelly awakened. In Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria (1957), Cabiria’s fiancé takes her pathetic dowry and runs; in Mikio Naruse’s When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960), the bar hostess Keiko seems prepared to accept the honorable intentions of a dumpy but endearing rich man only to learn that he is neither kindly nor wealthy, nor even single. Ivan is not that different, in that he understands the importance of money to the allure of matrimony; if no man wants a cheap woman, no woman wants a cheap ring. In this age-old tradition, there’s always a real or imaginary Pemberley on offer.

The question is what these women will do after they face the awful truth of male mendacity. Cabiria finds herself joining an impromptu festa and, despite her tears, affirming the life force after all. But the final smile she directs at the camera, at us, is almost unmeetable: we recoil from her still-naïve trustingness as something obscene. As for Keiko, she once again “ascends the stairs” to her hostess bar, resuming the welcoming face she presents to clients. It’s a false front but a reliable one, for her as well as for them. If her workaday routine is miserable, its misery can at least be depended on.

And Anora? When Igor drives her home, he gives her the $10,000 she’s been promised and, in a stupendous gesture, the ring she’d been stripped of. Though hardly a proposal, it is unmistakably a declaration of care. What is Anora to do with the ring, now voided of its signifying function? What is she to do with Igor’s gesture, which weights the jewelry with something less easily negotiable than carats? Ever the professional, Anora gets to work, fucking Igor cowgirl in the reclined car seat. But though she’d like it to be sex work, or at least like it to be like sex work, it isn’t. There is no suggestion that Igor thinks a sexual favor is owed him in exchange; he doesn’t want his gesture monetized; this is only how Anora chooses, or perhaps needs, to see it. When he tries to kiss her—not la chose à faire at Headquarters, where you don’t give face—she resists ferociously, prey to an unwonted intimacy panic.

And then, suddenly, she collapses in tears into his arms. A sex worker, heretofore never not on the job, now finds herself neither having sex nor doing work, as remote from the one as from the other. And along with her marriage, the very idea of marriage has been annulled. Igor’s intentions, however serious they became, wouldn’t change that. Her tears, some form of emotional release, are also tears of resignation. She is comforted by a man who might love her. But if the lesson she’s gleaned from life is to trust no man, then Igor’s care, unsolicited and paternal, is as much a defeat as a consolation.