Anora, the Russian doll

The trailer for Anora (2024), winner of the Palme d’Or at the last Cannes Film Festival, bills the film as “a love story by Sean Baker” – something that some critics seem to have taken seriously. Despite Mickey Madison’s ferocity in the title role – a sex worker at a New York nightclub who gets involved with an heir to the Russian plutocracy – some lamented her supposed naivety. In this visceral and hallucinatory tale, however, the brothel spectacle is not just a theme: it also contaminates the cinematic form and language. Let’s not be so quick to believe in its deliberate illusions.

The theatricality inherent in a sex program – the sale of a performance of normative hyperfemininity – is announced from the very first scene: a lateral tracking shot reveals the excitement produced on the assembly line of paid sex. In this neon factory of lust and pleasure, nothing seems so real – precisely because it perhaps isn’t. In the prologue, these plasticized images alternate, in an interruptive editing that stops the flow of visual pleasure, with fragments of Ani’s more bland daily life – as the protagonist prefers to be called, at least during working hours. Through the contrast – highlighted, including, by the lighting, which is more naturalistic in her moments of relaxation and rest – we unmistakably perceive the artificiality of the libidinal staging. By glimpsing the reverse side of desire, the seduction, at least with the audiences, is never complete.

This riddle of looks, at the very least, invites us to establish a cautious pact with Anora. Her encounters with Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), the young billionaire who starts to hire her exclusively, imprint (almost) the same tone and frenetic aesthetic as her regular workdays. It's not love, it's overtime. In a double performance, Mickey Madison has to sustain, like a matryoshka , the character within the character; fictionalizing affections is the only way to guarantee the viability of the final economic proposal, studded with a three-carat diamond: marriage. Even in her most obstinate defenses of this unlikely adventure – which, as soon as it is discovered, begins to be opposed by the boy's family –, the material concern with money never leaves her sights.

If such attachment does not incite critical ambiguity in Anora – and I believe it does –, who seems quite aware of the terms and conditions of her long-term contract, the characterization of Ivan as a spoiled, frail, video game-addicted playboy who, with an adolescent fury, does somersaults in bed before having sex, adds to some certainties. Far from embodying the upright and redeeming figure who, so many times in the history of cinema, "rescued" prostitutes from a previous and perverse marginality, Ivan is an obvious mockery of virile masculinity. The excesses of his caricatured composition, in an interpretation as captivating as it is hateful by Eydelshteyn, prevent us, at least in part, from accepting Ani's tenderness (and naivety) without suspicion.

Here, the comedy is not romantic, it is politicizing. In breaking expectations with consolidated cinematic genres – masked, prostituted – the irony of the first act of the film – a false re-edition of imaginaries established by features like Pretty Woman (Gary Marshall, 1990) – overflows and becomes utterly absurd in the second. The previously announced humor interferes, in an explosive and subversive alchemy, in the temperature of the drama that begins to take hold. In the clash with three bodyguards sent to dissolve the union – Toros (Karren Karagulian), Garnik (Vache Tovmasyan) and Igor (Yura Borisov) –, old stereotypes of a robust audiovisual culture shatter like the coffee table in Ivan's mansion. The prostitute is not a victim, her lover is not a hero and the henchmen are not the villainized male counterparts who usually channel and appease men's iniquity.

In fact, along with Anora, these types give face to the preferred subjects of Baker’s filmography – present in works such as Tangerine (2015), The Florida Project (2017), and Red Rocket (2021): the ultra-impoverished proletariat of the neoliberal capitalism of our time, which, against all odds, needs to unite when Ivan, the heir, flees to avoid retaliation. The furious search for the boy is inflamed, mainly, by class intersections: the employment of the henchmen – completely unfit for the job they perform – depends on this ill-fated journey, as much as Ani’s newly achieved financial security. Baker constantly emphasizes the actions and concerns of these and other precariat workers who sustain a fabulous and consumerist landscape that is beginning to collapse.

In the ending, the director bets on another form of sexual outlet to synthesize this ruin. Against a pornographic visual regime that, to some extent, modulated the relationship between Ani and Ivan, the protagonist seems to surrender to the kindness of Igor, one of the henchmen, in a silent, cold and sober final scene. With this choice, Baker may favor a moralistic reading of prostitution, as if sexual expression were the only possible way to enunciate the subjective crisis of his protagonist – because it is natural, atavistic. There are other, less essentialist, ways of removing the veil of the representational facade of prostitution: payment, especially equated in carats, seems to me a better happy ending for this love story.