As I walk into the sterile Beverly Hills screening room where I’ve come to see Sean Baker’s new film Anora, I’m struck by a sudden realization: Whoever coined the expression “sweating like a whore in church” clearly never watched a sex-worker movie in a room full of civilians.
I, the aforementioned churchgoer, tug at my miniskirt and brace myself. Will the film bros around me really have any idea whether a sex-work movie is any good? Critics have been raving that Anora “really speaks to sex workers” and “portray[s] sex work accurately,” but I’m not so sure. It wouldn’t be the first time someone made a film about sex workers that makes its subjects cringe.
Movies about sex workers tend to end in one of two ways: Either the worker gets out of the industry (“She’s going to be OK!”) or she’s punished for staying in it (“What could she expect?”). Along the way, she tends to experience violence, poverty, and stigma, and is almost never portrayed as powerful, autonomous, or, God forbid, competent. If we do get to know her, it’s usually her job we find fascinating (Belle de Jour)—not her as a person. And when she’s not being trivialized as a ditz (The Hangover), she’s being killed off as a plot device (Very Bad Things). With the exception of The Menu, Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, and Zola, there are very few movies about my profession that accurately represent my profession.
Critics have been comparing Anora with Pretty Woman, arguably the most well-known and mainstream sex-worker movie. But Vivian (played by Julia Roberts, in case you’ve been living under a rock since the ’80s) turns to sex work reluctantly, out of desperation, and falls into the lap of an equally naive client by sheer luck. In contrast, Anora’s Ani is experienced, ambitious, and strategic. She snags her whale (a high-rolling client) as a result of her aptitude and skills, not her naivete. She is not a desperate or trafficked waif, nor is she a hooker with a heart of gold. Baker doesn’t even set out to make her worthy of sympathy—instead, we’re in awe of her prowess as she works the floor of a high-end strip club while the opening credits play. We see her move from dance to dance, in and out of the VIP area, nailing pole tricks deftly. She scans the room for her next target while sucking her vape strategically. She drags someone’s dad to the ATM. Right away, it’s clear that we’re rooting for Ani not because she’s down and out like Vivian—we’re rooting for her because she’s shrewd and in control.
In the vein of Toulouse-Lautrec or Egon Schiele, Baker is an artist who returns to sex work over and over as his subject; Starlet, Tangerine, The Florida Project, and Red Rocket are all stories about either sex workers or those in close proximity to them. When asked at Cannes (where Anora took home the Palme d’Or) why sex workers are so heavily featured in his work, Baker replied that if there’s one intention with his films, it’s to “tell human stories” and “remove the stigma that’s been applied to this livelihood.” He’s also spoken up about our causes, particularly decriminalization. “It’s a livelihood, it’s a career, it’s a job, and it’s one that should be respected,” he said to press at the festival. “In my opinion, it should be decriminalized and not in any way regulated because it is a sex worker’s body and it is up to them to decide how they will use it in their livelihood.”
Baker even slipped some sex-worker talking points into Anora’s script. During one scene in the club, Ani brushes off her manager’s request for her to get back on the floor by telling him that until he gives her health insurance and a 401(k), he doesn’t get to tell her what to do because she’s an independent contractor, not an employee. The tumultuous landscape of workers’ rights for strippers and sex workers isn’t something most civilians are familiar with, yet Baker casually broaches the subject in a snappy, palatable way.
Hiring film consultants with lived experiences that parallel the stories he’s telling is another way Baker humanizes sex workers. One such consultant is Sophia Carnabuci, a pole dance instructor in Brooklyn, who shared with me via Instagram that she worked closely with Ani actress Mikey Madison to embody the real mechanics, experience, and slang of the strip club. (Madison also practiced dancing with Los Angeles dancer Kennady Schneider for months before shooting began.) Andrea Werhun, author of Modern Whore: A Memoir, was brought in as a chief consultant, and Baker also cast real sex workers in the film. Lindsey Normington, who plays Ani’s nemesis Diamond, is a real stripper in L.A. who campaigned to help her club, Star Garden, become unionized.
You can see the influence and expertise of these sex workers woven throughout the film. Stripping is a job that requires hard-won skills, discipline, and tenacity. (I would know—I sweat my own G-string off in some of the best clubs in Las Vegas and New Orleans.) It is work. And more importantly, Ani is good at it. In the opening scene, we see an honest smile spread across her face while she dances for a client. This is a real moment of what I like to call “heaux joy,” or taking pleasure in the power of your body as a sex worker (as a weapon that both makes men give you money and is able to dance gracefully for hours in 8-inch Pleasers). Baker could have easily played to the male gaze here, showing inserts of Ani’s undulating body from the perspective of her client or the audience. But he doesn’t. Instead, he fixes the camera on her face as we watch her smile to herself. In this way, he makes something clear from the jump: This is a movie about neither exploitation nor voyeurism. It’s a love letter. Not to beauty, but to grit.
One of the most powerful scenes in the film takes place when we watch Ani fight for her life against two Armenian men who’ve been sent to capture her husband. The scene is intended to be hilarious, but it comes off mostly as shocking, with Ani bringing the professional tough guys to their knees in fear. While so many sex-worker films are quick to show us as weak to justify our circumstances—or to dole out suffering as retribution for our sins—Baker instead portrays Ani as strategic, scrappy, and a survivor. She’s not a victim, nor is she “empowered” in some postfeminist pseudo-spiritual way. She’s just determined to get what’s hers, be it money or her freedom, and nothing, not even a pair of burly mobsters, is going to stop her. This is something most films about sex workers ignore, but Baker and Madison manage to capture it convincingly.
Not every worker I spoke with saw Ani’s fight scene the same way as I did. Terra, a sex worker in Los Angeles, felt it simply regurgitated the same violence against sex workers that makes films in the genre so disappointing. “Ani getting kidnapped, assaulted, and repeatedly used as a pawn while the other characters make ‘jokes’ at her expense are choices made by the director that normalize violence against us,” she told me. Mia, a retired escort also in L.A., agrees. “The scene where Anora gets beat up really brought up the truth that many sex workers face, which is the high rate of violence against them,” she said. “That danger, that threat, is so real for sex workers. To see it be part of the comedic elements of the film was pretty haunting, if I’m being honest.”
To Terra, much of this has to do with the fact that although Baker is a pretty stellar advocate, he’s still, well, a man. And few men, unless they’re sex workers themselves, can really capture the experience of what it’s like to do this job. “It’s written by a man and directed by a man,” she continued. “I don’t care who was involved in the film, consulting-wise—this is ultimately a film from the male gaze. Haven’t we seen enough of this?”
In an ideal world, sex workers would make our own movies, and we do: There are sex-worker film festivals in many major cities. But we also need mainstream representation to combat the stigma that allows people to vilify and murder us. In an industry in which you have to keep what you do a secret for safety and legal reasons—and the only people who know how nuanced your work is (clients) are silent about their support for fear of stigma—it feels good to have someone with power, like Baker, throw his weight behind us.
The final scene is something I have struggled to wrap my head around. That Ani has a love interest felt totally unnecessary, almost as if added at the insistence of studio executives, as well as that hot, sweet, and sensitive Yura Borisov (Igor) could get it for free. In the end, he returns Ani’s previously relinquished engagement ring, symbolic of the life that slipped through her fingers, but also an object worth thousands of dollars. Igor, a henchman who also “sells his body” for a wage to the elite, understands Ani in a way that no one besides her fellow dancers can. She is moved by the gesture, and so she does what she knows how to do: attempts to seduce him to express her gratitude. Igor melts a bit at first, but as things escalate, he stops her by grabbing her and holding her body still, as if to say, “You don’t get to do that with me.” He demands to see the real her, not the performance. He looks at her until the mask of persona drops—the inevitable falling apart that Ani is due given everything she has been through; that anyone who sees her as a real person, and not a sexual service animal, knows is beneath the surface. She collapses in his arms as we fade to black.
I suppose the filmmakers wanted to leave the audience with some hope for Ani eventually having a happy ending, but to me, it felt oblivious, missing the point. For Ani, and many sex workers, the real Cinderella story is about survival (or, ideally, transcending the need to survive). In sex-worker movies like Pretty Woman, there is often a man who comes to the rescue in some way—maybe he’s a client; maybe he’s the nice guy who sees the “true her.” And even though that does occasionally happen in the real world, a far more accurate and relatable ending would have been Ani returning to the club to see her best friend and get a pep talk. Or stealing the ring herself and buying a car or a condo. At least take the ring from Igor and pay your rent, Ani! To me, this is the part that Baker will never fully understand. Clients are a means to an end. Money will never break your heart.
So, then, is Anora a “good” representation of sex work? Civilians seem to think so—it has glowing reviews and has been tipped as this year’s Oscar front-runner—but that’s a hard question to answer for those of us who understand what the work is really like. Every sex worker is different, and no single film can ever encompass all of our stories, our meandering paths, and our varied experiences. Some of us work only on the internet, doing cam work or phone sex. Some of us dance in clubs. Some of us make porn. Some of us work on the street—on “the Blade” or “the Stroll”—or we freestyle out of casinos. Some of us do the “girlfriend experience.” Others do only QV (quick visits). Some of us work as healers, alongside therapists, or aid in end-of-life care. Many of us, like Ani, end up blurring the lines between different forms of sex work, transitioning from being a stripper to a professional girlfriend to a stay-at-home wife. Some of us love our jobs, and some of us hate it. As with any profession, it’s often a mix of both. But in the case of Anora, it’s not just about the job. It’s her that we find interesting, not what she does for money.
That doesn’t mean Anora is a flawless movie. “I think Anora did show both the empowering and disheartening aspects of sex work,” said Mia. “The cattiness of ‘the club.’ The rush, or the high, of a good client. The aftermath of it. There were recognizable aspects of Anora’s experience—negotiating rates, having chemistry with a client—but somehow it felt like it remained on the surface. I had hoped it would have gone beyond the fetishization of the profession, but alas. To me, I felt like sex workers were novelty items once again for cinematic consumption.” Like I said: This movie is going to hit differently for each of us.
I liked Anora, but even I felt confused by Ani’s motivations. Was she playing a role for her client, or did she truly believe that she was in love with him? Why would she accept a smaller sum to walk away from him than what she was earning as his companion? But the fact that the questions I am left with after watching Anora are centered in Ani’s choices, experiences, and mindset makes clear to me that Baker has managed to make a movie about a sex worker where she is actually a human being. Perhaps that’s applauding the bare minimum, but for someone who knows of very few films that reflect my experience as a sex worker, it was a joy for me to feel seen.
Movies will continue to be made about us, just as people will continue to be fascinated by us, because what we do to pay our bills spits in the face of dominant cultural ideas about gender roles, work, sex, and love. In a world where the police still call murdered sex workers nonhumans and politicians weaponize our livelihoods for votes, what I appreciate most about Anora is that Ani is an authentic hustler, with all the moral gray area that comes with the job, and she still remains someone we root for.
This post was originally published on here
