By Ava Caradonna. Originally published at OpenDemocracy.
Anora, this year’s feisty update on the 1990 film Pretty Woman, has become something of a critical darling. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Palme d’Or. Its lead, Mikey Madison, has been tipped to win best actress at the Oscars. And The Guardian just named it one of 2024’s best films.
Watching Anora as a sex worker, I found it a welcome departure from the long list of reactionary and misogynist portrayals of workers in the sex industry. It’s certainly not a perfect film, and reviewers have been particularly split over the meaning of the last scene (there are dozens of takes on this).
But the plotline isn’t what sets Anora apart. The film’s representation of the work of sex is a quiet, radical act, and for that it deserves its accolades.
Most cultural products grappling with sex work fail to show even minimal respect to sex workers. We are made fun of, portrayed as dumb, vilified, blamed for our own misfortune, and abused without end. Many characters are simply killed off to hammer home the myth that overtly transactional relationships are inherently more dangerous than being a wife or girlfriend.
Anora has both violence and humour. But its eponymous main character, a Brooklyn stripper and sometimes escort who “goes by Ani”, wasn’t put on screen to be comic relief – or a moral lesson for the audience. She’s a class-conscious, modern-day Cinderella, and the story she tells revolves around her short, action-packed relationship with Ivan, an immature, entitled, and obscenely rich son of a Russian oligarch. It’s fun – a riot of colour and sharp editing that mixes rom-com lines with gangster comedy antics.
But pervading it all is the work of sex: the daily grind of selling services packaged as fantasies on a piece rate. In Anora, sex work is presented with complexity. For instance, the small displays of the whorearchy were interesting and pretty accurate. Ani may be played by a civvie actress (someone without lived experience of the sex industry), but the film’s directors paid sex workers to consult on the script and production. The result is one of the most nuanced representations of sex work ever to be put on film.
Nothing About Us Without Us
The insistence on being included has long been a demand of the sex worker rights movement. A rallying call when it comes to the creation of government policies that directly impact sex workers, ‘nothing about us without us’ is also a clear demand on films, exhibitions and documentaries that attempt to represent sex work.
Sex workers demand a seat at the table because so few people have a realistic understanding of what it’s like to actually work in the sex industry. Society has long held a morbid fascination with the lives, and more accurately the bodies, of sex workers. But the way that sex work is policed and imagined traps sex workers as either objects of fantasy or bodies to be condemned, and it fundamentally prevents empathy and warps all comprehension. Sex workers need to speak for themselves as a corrective to this. We need to speak for ourselves because the conversation is about us.
The migrant sex worker rights collective the x:talk project, which formed in London in 2006, sum it up well:
As workers in the sex industry we are often denied a voice, we are considered only passive victims, we are taught to be ashamed of our work, we are made invisible by discriminatory laws that illegalise our work and us, and we are spoken for and about but rarely are we allowed to speak for ourselves.
We can tell from the very first scene that Anora’s director, Sean Baker, listened when his sex worker advisors spoke. The film opens in Headquarters, the strip club Ani works at, and uses a montage of clips to take us through the repetitive work of hustling for customers and servicing their desires. Smile, dance, repeat.
We also see the dynamics between workers – the good, the bad and the ugly – as well as the economics between the dancers and the club. Chewing gum, vapes and the same clothes being taken on and off feature heavily. On her break, Ani eats homemade food out of a Tupperware, jokes about her customers, and complains about the DJ with her colleagues. Later on, she tells her boss that only when he gives her a pension, health benefits and insurance can decide when and how she works.
Such scenes not only directly tackle Ani’s working conditions as a stripper. They also provide an insight into the decades of labour organising in strip clubs, not only in America but also across Britain. In most strip clubs, workers are falsely considered to be ‘self-employed’ or ‘freelancers’. They must commonly pay “house fees” to work – in London upwards of £150 per night – while receiving none of the benefits of an employment contract, like guaranteed minimum wage, paid sick and annual leave, a pension plan, or maternity leave.
Strip clubs are one of the few businesses that make money simply by having workers turn up to work. The scene of Ani pushing back against her boss, who is attempting to impose the discipline of the wage without the benefits of an employment contract, could never have been in the original Pretty Woman. Its inclusion is a testament to 25 years of organising by a sex worker rights movement that has always insisted that one does not have to love one’s job to deserve labour rights.
Fantasies for Sale
Film has always depicted a fantasy of what sex work is and who it involves. Anora gets a lot closer than most, but perhaps the biggest misconception of sex work is that it’s actually even more mundane, repetitive and boring than even this film suggests. Strip clubs are often dead, with more women working than customers on the floor. Hours are spent sitting around in brothels, watching daytime television and waiting for clients to arrive. The labour of removing body hair is endless, and endlessly annoying, while making small talk with strangers for hours can make you feel insane.
There is also the fundamental paradox that sex work often requires mimicing non-commodified intimacy. Clients suspend their disbelief, allowing themselves to think that workers ‘want’ to be there, that they find them attractive, and that the question of money is only secondary, even though they’re paying for the privilege. The girlfriend experience, a common service offered by escorts, is the epitome of this. Of course this fantasy goes only one way: from the worker’s point of view, money is the central relation structuring the transaction. Anora gives us a rare window into what inhabiting this performance and its paradox entails.
Cinderella is a fairy tale about a woman freed from the drudgery of work through love and marriage. Pretty Woman copied it, as has Anora, but it’s a story arc that’s hardly exclusive to sex workers. As the plot of most rom-coms, it’s a dominant gender discourse that reveals how heterosexual relationships are imagined and promotes the idea that all girls (good and bad) are waiting to be swept away (or rescued depending on their class location) by an appropriately wealthy prince.
But while Ani the character indulges in elements of this fantasy, Anora the film grapples with the deceptions inherent in the quest for class mobility and pushes against some of the discomforting aspects of the institution of marriage and being a wife. In Anora the slipper is replaced by a four-carat ring, and we are asked to consider just how stable and pure the marriage contract really is. We are also compelled to interrogate the rags to riches story within the context of the chaos, stigma and shame associated with being a whore and also the gendered inverse, the male gangsters who are also just doing it for the money.
The eventual demise of Ani and Ivan’s relationship also reflects the reality of how the Cinderella fantasy is structured by power relations. Clients will promise you the world, profess their love as long as that world is tightly constrained to hotel rooms and private spaces. When their position in society, their proximity to their class, wealth and heteronormativity is threatened, they will drop you as fast as they can.
Anora doesn’t provide the easy, happily-ever-after ending found in traditional fairy tales, but the breakdown of Ani and Ivan’s relationship has a certain inevitability. It serves as a cautionary tale of the disposability of service workers and the violence at the heart of the nuclear family and the inheritance of wealth. Throughout the whole film there is a tension between the self-awareness of inhabiting and performing a risky Cinderella fairy tale, and the compulsion to escape to the grind of neoliberal work.
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I went to see this film and found it coldly unmoving. Supposed to be a romantic comedy, but instead it is a sordid, humourless cliched mess pitting sleazy American sex workers against cardboard Russian caricatures. Shame as I thought his previous film, Tangerine, was very good with sympathetic characters.
It was not at all supposed to be a romantic comedy though it was sometimes advertised that way. The idea that this is an update of Pretty Woman is insane, more like a repudiation of it.
But agreed, I was shocked but not surprised by yet another horrible depiction of Russians.
Sean Baker is a great director and this film is well made, but the content of this film…
The depictions of sex work were absolutely shot in a way meant to titillate, so in a fundamental way, they were not from the workers’ perspective.
This is have your cake and eat it, elite approved, Twitter/Tumblr 21st century liberalism: Russophobia, denigration of religion, celebration of sex work, noticing inequality without suggesting anything be done about it.
Edited to add: anyone who uses the phrase “Russian oligarch” in the 21st century immediately discredits themselves. Thanks to Putin, Russia is less oligarchic in its government than the US.
“This is have your cake and eat it, elite approved, Twitter/Tumblr 21st century liberalism: Russophobia, denigration of religion, celebration of sex work, noticing inequality without suggesting anything be done about it.”
An excellent summation of what I find about so many of my “liberal progressive” colleagues and friends, and of course in so many artistic products created to be sold in the neoliberal world. It reminds me of the endless indigenous “land acknowledgements” by people with absolutely no intention of doing anything about the injustices underlying those acknowledgements. And of course the embedding of Orwell’s the “two minutes of hate” into artistic products, as with the horrible depiction of the Russian official enemy.
absolutely. It is a worn-out and outdated cliché. Besides the actual archetype of oligarchic regime and society is USA. Musk, Zuckerberg, Gates, Bezos, Soros, etc;
Call it what you will but it’s still the commodification of flesh and loneliness.
Drug dealing is work too I suppose. I’m sure drug dealers also see themselves as businessmen giving people what they want…
Isn’t all work in exchange for anything, mostly for money, a commodification of the flesh?
Even the institution of marriage, so long as it is transactional, is a commodification.
I suggest you broaden your view of what sex work amounts to. A friend who has had a very active sex life maintains men should always pay for sex.
Look at how it operates here in Thailand. This sort of thing depicted in the video below absolutely happens all the time, farang men being milked by Thai women and then being dumped. This is virtually a cliche here yet men fall for it again and agin Thai women are master manipulators (as a friend who was chair of a condo board here attests, she who tried to get a woman who was stealing at work as the manager of the condo and engaged in other grifts fired and failed). A farang friend who knew the prototypical pattern very well nevertheless got involved with a Thai woman who he was convinced loved him….confirmed by the fact that she was extremely upset to be told by her family to dump him in favor of a very rich Austrian.
And that is how it rolls here. Loyalty to the Thai birth family trumps any marital/romantic relationship, particularly with farangs.
That is not to say that there are not quite a few successful farang man/Thai woman marriages, but I have a very strong suspicion the family deemed the man to be a reliable earner or otherwise a keeper.
The farang above resolved after the experience above only to date orphans. He pretty much succeeded, his partner hails from another country in Southeast Asia and had been sold into slavery.
One of the things that most struck me about Thai-foreigner relationships is that there is virtually NO permanent residence in Thailand–well, technically there is, but hardly anyone qualifies for it and it is much less generous than the US green card.
So every three months or so, people who had Thai spouses and children, not to mention jobs and property in the country, had to go wait in line at the immigration office to do a quarterly check in. (At least this was the case circa 10 years ago.)
So a Thai spouse would seem to have a de facto deportation order hanging over their partner’s head.
Thailand does a good job of making everyone with a little cash “feel welcome” but the immigration regime is crystal clear.
Yes, that is true now. Even if you get a 20 year visa, you still have to do an immigration check-in, but you can have the Elite visa service handle it rather than appear personally.
You can get citizenship but you have to become fluent in Thai, which is an extremely difficult language. I have yet to meet anyone who is fluent. I have met (not many) farangs who have gotten to the “pretty good” level.
There was a previous reaction piece to the movie Pretty Woman, 1991’s Whore with Theresa Russell.
It was actually a play written by a British taxi driver, after Pretty Woman came out director Ken Russell couldn’t get it made in the UK so he came to Los Angeles.
The style of the movie was campy, and not “serious”; the style with breaking the fourth wall was what the movie I, Tonya nailed; Whore does not stick the landing, but is still worth watching.
I don’t believe I’ve seen Whore but there are lots of movies about prostitution with Jane Fonda in Klute being one of the most respected. The theme of that film is that the lead’s “I’ve got this all under control” attitude–similar to the above author–is an illusion and merely the way of rationalizing her own alienation.
Needless to say involving Garry Marshall in such a discussion doesn’t exactly signal deep thinking.
Not that yours truly would claim such a thing but the emotions involved with sex are a bit more complicated than cash register getting it off. Attractive women have power and men may respond with their own power which is violence–hence the pimps and the sordid world of drugs and a different kind of male domination. If it’s all really about fantasy then maybe we should let AI take over the job and there’s movie about that too.
I was a sex worker and swam in that world for years. Its basically paid rape.
Anyone who says different is lying to you, or themselves, or both.
Piecework is alienating by definition, like all wage labor. I grant there are degrees of alienation.
I’m always curious about writers who identify as “sex workers” (a *migrant* sex worker in this case!) while also making it clear that they have a quality humanities education and are at home in elite leftist spaces. It usually turns out to be someone who briefly worked at a strip club, seemingly to build credentials (much like Pete Buttigieg did with his military service), or an anonymous writer who could easily be lying. In either case, the writer is trying to merge maximalist sex positivity with the labor movement, creating such strange impressions of labor activism that you wonder if the goal is to turn people away from labor activism.
In NYC at least, the strip clubs do not allow prostitution. They bounce the men who try to touch the girls out so fast your head would spin, and escort them to cabs at the end of their shift. The girls may nevertheless find ways to hand out their details to customers so as to sell sex to them off premises.
I have this from a friend who was a stripper and worked at several clubs, including a favored Wall Street destination, Scores, both based on her direct experience and reports from strippers who had worked at other venues. I have no doubt there were some that skirted the rules big time but I infer this was not the norm.
My friend had a degree in dance and had even become a working ballerina, but was unable to pay her student debt bills, and so turned to stripping. Her having a less than ideal body for stripping (not terribly curvaceous) was apparently adequately compensated for by her dance skills.
Interesting, because Anora going to a client’s home is a major plot point, and the film strongly implies that the club manager and security know about it.
I have a friend doing advanced research at a prestigious Ivy institution. One of her fellow researchers is supplementing her stipend with a part time OnlyFans account. The latter pays many times more than the former, which leads to occasional musings from my friend about the messed-up value systems that result from neoliberalism.
The trick of the west. I see now.
The west’s answer to any problem is … to make a movie! :DD
Or maybe that’s the second step. The first step is to drop a few bombs. :DD
Seriously, I can see the future … in a few years, there will be a movie about Gaza and it will be made by a Jew with sympathetic views towards all the dead Gazans. It will be artful.
The west is such a big giant fuck.
Not only will America go to your country and kill all your people. But they’ll come back 20 years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad.
As far as Israeli war movies go, here’s one that’s worth a watch:
Lebanon (2009)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1483831/
Just thought I’d add, that even though I totally disagree with this review, I really like idea of film discussion on NC.
As they say in the profession, if you are beautiful people pay you for it, if not , you have to give it for free to some dude.
Welcome to the final stages of peak civilization, merchandizing of all human relationships.
ANORA screenplay pdf download
https://www.simplyscripts.com/2024/12/24/anora-screenplay-for-your-consideration/