Anora: Let’s Make a Deal

“You’re gonna get your fucking money, and you’re gonna walk away . . . That was the deal.”

Anora is full of agreements, tacit or otherwise. The agreement to be a girlfriend or a wife, to get an annulment, to get on a private plane with a bunch of assholes. But it’s the agreements we make with ourselves that we dare not break; to do so would trigger a crack in our self-image, the thing that motivates and directs us as we attempt to navigate an unpredictable world. For anyone who makes their living in the openly transactional realm of commercial sex, that self is expertly guarded.

Director Sean Baker’s frequent return to this realm is often commented upon. And while this repeated authorial choice synthesizes various aspects of sex work on film going back decades—sometimes to playfully comment on existing archetypes—his oeuvre notably correlates to the period of the 1970s and ’80s, when the prosaic qualities of sex work first became visible to mainstream audiences in films like Klute, Hustling, and Pretty Baby. One can see clear threads from Andy Milligan’s Fleshpot on 42nd Street (1972), for instance, to Baker’s Tangerine (2015). It was an era when filmmakers deliberately located sex work within the broader labor movement, reflecting the real-world shift among activists who popularized the term sex work to emphasize the link between sexual and domestic labor. In a 2019 essay on sex work in seventies cinema, scholar Sarah Ann Wells offers that these depictions mirror working-class anxieties in general, such as “the shape-shifting working day, the experience of affective and immaterial labor, and the erosion of work’s status as an organizing principle for daily life.” Over the next decade, films of all genres—from Tony Garnett’s earnest Prostitute (1980) to Lizzie Borden’s satirical Working Girls (1986)—sought to center what film scholar Russell Campbell called the historically “socially decentered” sex worker in discussions of the mechanics of their jobs. Inherent in these discussions was always the question of what kinds of mental barriers must be erected to keep selfhood intact in the face of (what many presumed to be) dehumanizing labor.

Baker’s kinship with the seventies sex-worker film plays out on a couple of—some might say opposing—levels. That he’s interested in the sex worker is apparent. But one can also see a deep appreciation for European sleaze, where the sex worker was an equally prominent protagonist in films like Rino Di Silvestro’s The Red Light Girls (1974) and Ingrid sulla strada (1973), by Fellini collaborator Brunello Rondi. Where Baker furthers the conversation is in his approach to the topic. Existing scholarship tends to demonize or romanticize sex work, as do many films—think of the tragic, hopeless Last Exit to Brooklyn (1989) versus something like Doctor Detroit (1983), in which sex work is barely dangerous and presented as a civic community that unites and uplifts its workers. Baker, on the other hand, takes a more complex approach to these transactional relationships, each time centering different aspects—the adult-film performer of Starlet (2012), whose work life is sublimated into her role as surrogate daughter; the child’s perspective on her stripper mother’s life in The Florida Project (2017), in which we see mostly what she sees; the “suitcase pimp” of Red Rocket (2021), who yearns to make a comeback with someone else’s labor—but resolutely aiming to humanize his characters by depicting their daily realities, always peppered with moments of connection and joy.

Even though the transactional framework for the central relationship is so transparent, there’s no doubt that the film is positioned as (or at least plays with the language of) a love story. Baker is offering a clear correlation between the transactional elements of sex work and those of what is perceived as love, both of which are seen as an exchange and a deliverance.

But in many films centering this kind of work, sex for hire is seen as contradicting the potential for true love, as Campbell discusses in his 2006 book Marked Women, an exhaustive study of the tropes surrounding sex work in film. Thus the prostitute love story typically creates an opposition between the sex worker’s romantic ideals and their job. As can be gleaned from a century of on-screen examples, the “redemption story” (what we see in something like Pretty Woman) is dominant in Western depictions of the sex worker, often featuring a class contrast in which the male protagonist comes from titled aristocracy or some significant wealth and redeems the prostitute through domestication (in return she usually teaches him how to be less of a wet blanket). An interesting point of reference for Baker’s upending of this story-type in Anora is the 1927 film Resurrection, which features a Russian prince who is emasculated by his overbearing parents and falls in love with a peasant girl turned prostitute. While he initially capitulates to his family and betrays her, in the end he offers to marry her—but she refuses, and, as Campbell notes, “is thus spiritually regenerated” (hence the film’s title). There are clearly transactions more compromising to one’s integrity than prostitution.

Still, the fairy-tale potential of Anora is established and reinforced throughout its first act: the opening song, with its lyrics “this could be the greatest day of our lives”—later repurposed for the rapid-fire wedding scene—almost recalls the defiant romance of David Bowie’s “Heroes” (also used ironically, as the theme song for 1981’s Christiane F., a depressing love story between two codependent heroin addicts). And the fairy-tale imagery is summoned directly when Ani tells her colleague about her lifelong dream to spend her honeymoon at Disney World, just like Cinderella (bringing to mind The Florida Project and its ironic relationship to the Magic Kingdom). Ani’s adventure is absolutely being set up as one of fantastical wish fulfillment, with Ivan’s hulking McMansion a veritable Candy Land of drugs and sex, diamonds and furs, all dramatically framed by its Jamaica Bay vista—seemingly light-years away from her unglamorous Brighton Beach duplex. There is magic being spun here, and Ani is willing to go all in on the fantasy. She’s not alone in this; in her memoir Modern Whore, Andrea Werhun (who served as a consultant on Baker’s film) says of the time an escort spends with her john: “the space is a magical one in which unreal things are rendered real.”

But the rug gets pulled out pretty quick. While role-play is familiar terrain for any sex worker, one can tell in ten seconds that the kid Ani has hedged her bets on is just that—a kid, who is very much on his own escapist trip of irresponsibility. Ivan’s absence in the second act of the film is an extension of his absence in the first, whether through drugs, video games, loud or obliterating noise—he tries in every way to not be present intellectually or emotionally. “I’m always happy,” he says, with the breeziness of a habitual disassociator. When his anxious minder Toros summons the image of spaceships lining the walls in his bedroom, it just reinforces what we already know. And what Ani must know too . . . right?

“You are not a part of our family,” Ivan’s imposing mother, Galina, practically spits at Ani, reinforcing this distinction, and prompting Ani to reiterate that she and Ivan are “in love.” Interestingly, though Ani declares her love for Ivan to a number of people—essentially a series of “witnesses”—at no point does she say it to Ivan. One might speculate that Ani finds it safer to vocalize this to a witness than to share such an emotion intimately and directly. Or even that she is—as is referenced earlier in the film—“manifesting.” But this again brings to mind the notion of love as a component of social exchange, in which all behavior is strategically motivated toward self-centered goals and rewards. In this context, the source of Ani’s outrage is that Ivan so easily violates their mutually beneficial agreement.

But if we also sense shame in her rejection, it is because of the agreement she made with herself, to love him. To say you love someone out loud is a form of exchange, an external offering. But the experience of love is something else—something that happens internally. Like all forms of manifestation, that internal emotional attachment of love can be triggered just by vocalizing it. And as Ani repeats it throughout the film, visualizing the fulfillment of her own potential, the emotions become more entrenched, threatening harm from within.

Ani remains underestimated throughout the film by everyone except Igor, who recognizes that, within this realm of abusive social hierarchies, she has fought to preserve her integrity. But as the last moments of the movie show, transactions are all she knows. She misinterprets a kind gesture as something that has to be reciprocated. It leads to a dangerous moment of self-awareness in which she sees herself reflected in the eyes of, well, a comrade for what she really is: a woman who has struggled and will continue to struggle. We tend to resent those who witness us at such low moments. All this time she has been clamoring for a different kind of witness, a witness to the ascendancy she has manifested—someone to see her win. It’s a devastating ending. Baker gives us maybe ten seconds of her walls crashing down before mercifully cutting to the credits to limit her exposure to us, the nonreciprocal audience, because we don’t deserve the privilege of seeing her break.

Anora: Let’s Make a Deal

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