January 5, 2025



Shoe, manufactured by Pleaser (2001), Gift of Harold Koda, 2001 to the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Romance Labor: on Sean Baker’s Anora
by Marla Cruz

Over the last decade Sean Baker has produced four sex worker centered films while at the same time sex workers in America have experienced a series of major political losses. The 2024 presidential election gave us the choice to vote between two people responsible for those losses, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. As California attorney general, Harris was instrumental in the federal government’s seizure and shut down of Backpage.com, a popular website where sex workers advertised their services, on April 6, 2018. Just five days later, Trump signed SESTA/FOSTA into law, making website owners liable for the criminal sexual activity of their site’s users, effectively shuttering multiple platforms where sex workers advertised and shared industry-related information with each other.

After losing the online platforms necessary to work independently and indoors, the poorest sex workers had no choice but to find clients on the streets and through coercive managers. Many sex workers were abused, exploited and even murdered under these worsening conditions. Trump’s victory over Harris marks the forward march of the reactionary sexual politics that has threatened the safety and livelihoods of sex workers since I was 19 years old posting ads on the now defunct Craigslist personals page. We, sex workers, would continue to suffer regardless of which candidate won.

When asked by the L.A. Times about the political potential of his films given their marginalized subjects, Baker spoke about his art in the language of the chattering class. “I don’t want to preach,” he explained, “We are already so incredibly divided as a country that if I start preaching my politics, I’m gonna alienate 50% of the population. I think that art is about bringing people together and sparking discussion.” Art cannot unify without engaging with the reality that we do not all experience alienation the same way. This country is not nearly as divided as Baker thinks it is on the subject of his peculiar cinematic fascination. Senators Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) were the only votes against SESTA/FOSTA in a 97-2 vote count.

Anora, introduced as “a love story by Sean Baker,” fails to inject the transcendency of love into the bleak reality sex workers face. Baker flattens the subject at hand into a cinematic replication of the regressive status quo. The politics in Anora are a mile wide and an inch deep with repetitive, trite iterations of a sex worker’s suffering where even her ability to love is stifled by how society marginalizes her. Anora shows us the immiseration of a sex worker but it shirks any responsibility to help the audience understand it. The burden of imagining and advocating for a better world is left to the real life sex workers Baker hires on set, including Anora’s Lindsey Normington (“Diamond”) who was a key member in unionizing Los Angeles’s Star Garden topless dive bar dancers in 2023 with the Actors’ Equity Association.

Sean Baker’s maximalist depiction of sex work begins with the camera panning around a strip club, eye level with the male customers, to topless strippers giving lap dances. The women’s bodies are shot up close to fit the screen. Tits first, ass second. Then, Mikey Madison’s face comes into full view as our titular character, Ani, grinds on a man’s lap. Memories of my 4-year stint working the strip club in 6-inch heels and string bikinis come flooding back. By her third lap dance on screen, I am already exhausted and impatient to be relieved from the tedium of a graveyard shift peopled by goofy, predictable club customers. The tone of its general reception by a non-industry audience suggests that maybe I would have to abandon all my past experiences in the sex industry in order to enjoy this movie.

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In the strip club, every observer is a consumer of adult entertainment. The consumer’s perspective is firmly established through this opening montage where we, the audience, are witnessing the physical and emotional labor of strippers for our own amusement. Anora subverts the sex worker’s perspective by collapsing vital tensions between the laborer and the consumer. Sex workers who perform the emotional labor of romance often curate a persona, a psychological buffer between how we feel and how we want our clients to feel. Here, the 23-year-old stripper Ani believes in the romance she’s selling Ivan, a 21-year-old wealthy Russian party boy who goes by the nickname Vanya. Too earnest for an entertainer’s persona, she even uses her real name in the strip club. When she agrees to meet Vanya at his mansion and become his “horny American girlfriend” for a week, she shows up to work as herself, satisfying the customer's fantasy of knowing who the stripper really is. To a career sex worker like myself, the contradictory burdens between being a person and being a worker are glaringly absent. 

Ani and Vanya’s whirlwind romance is possible because the sex worker’s personality is cut whole cloth from client preferences. She enjoys partying and doing cocaine together. She is charmed by Vanya’s emotional and sexual immaturity. She conceives of love as a curated, luxury experience — a perfect match for a young man with generational wealth and an urgent need for a compliant woman and a green card. The few brief moments of tension occur without objection from Ani. Weariness registers in her expressions but does not prompt her into action; she sits silently in Vanya’s lap as he nonchalantly loses thousands upon thousands of dollars gambling.

I spent the first half of the movie searching fruitlessly for any boundary between Ani the person and Ani the worker. I had mostly given up by the time Vanya proposes to Ani in a Las Vegas penthouse and she chides him for toying with her emotions. Sex workers navigate our work-life boundaries over and over again with each individual client. Genuine sex worker-client-turned-lovers relationships are anchored in consciously breaking down and remaking new boundaries together. But when Vanya proposes, there is only a single flash of internal conflict on Ani’s face before she accepts his marriage proposal and they run off to a Vegas chapel for a quickie wedding. Any boundaries she may have tried to maintain are overshadowed by her desire for Vanya to lift her out of the strip club and into his indulgent lifestyle of convenience and entertainment. It is predictable that Vanya is unconcerned with the prospect of spousal obligations to Ani. To him their marriage is a legal form he signed to maintain his status as an unemployed gamer. She is changing nothing about his life and his talent for charming her implies the promise she never will.

Ani’s shallowness masquerades as a desire for class ascendancy, a sympathetic stand-in for the deeper motivations we must assume exist with what little information the script provides about her goals and priorities. Despite the initial $15k/week wage Vanya pays her, as soon as she leaves the club Ani is not a (sex) worker anymore and reacts indignantly when anyone refers to her former status. Her impulsive commitment to being a manchild’s eternal plaything computes as a negation of labor in her mind because it comes wrapped in the title of “Vanya’s little wifey.” Hypnotized by dreams of assimilating into the capitalist class rather than toiling to entertain them, Ani miscalculates the boundaries between herself and her labor at her own peril.

 Anora moves too swiftly between the dizzying Las Vegas wedding and its aftermath—the abrupt arrival of the three henchmen of Vanya’s parents who demand the marriage be annulled— to uphold my initial assessment of Ani and her motives. I assumed a woman who worked the club with her seasoned charisma would have already learned what I know from years of experience: there is very little room for error in the sex industry. One lapse in judgement can cost us dearly. Instantaneous and unerring discernment is our most important defense against men who prey on our vulnerabilities. This lesson comes early in the working lives of many sex workers through both personal experience and by witnessing the abuse, exploitation, and unjust deaths of our colleagues. The congratulatory consensus from Ani’s coworkers as she cleans out her club locker strikes an outlandish tone. I could not believe a room full of sex workers in Manhattan, the epicenter of capital and its inherent inequalities, would not include one soul who notices that the dramatic power imbalance in her new marriage could pose a threat to her safety.

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V
iolence against sex workers is disciplinary; it's meant to punish us, to put us in our place at the bottom of society. Men and women of all classes perceive sex workers as beneath the working class. We are treated as an underclass of women, more vulnerable than other types of working class women due to our marginalization in the formal economy, the criminal court system and society at large. Our lower class status enables people to commit violence against us without consequences. We are unlikely to come forward for fear of being criminalized and discriminated against as sex workers. The men who abuse and harass Anora in this movie do not fear any repercussions for their actions. 

As a romance, Anora develops in parallel Ani’s whirlwind marriage and her final ill-fated encounter with Igor. The movie develops Igor’s interest in Ani through multiple shots wherein she is the decentered, often out-of-focus, object of his attention. His pensive glances at her are heavy with innuendo. Once he successfully intimidates her into complying with their search for Vanya, he can perform small acts of care for her. This irony is captured in high relief when he hands her the red scarf to keep warm and Ani recognizes he kept it on hand as a weapon against her. Unlike Toros and Garnick, Igor has no prior relationship to Vanya’s family. He’s a mercenary who showed up to work that day with a straightforward objective: handle the family’s latest problem, Ani, with force. His priorities are diametrically opposed to her class ambitions. They may both use their bodies to make a living, but his use of physical violence to intimidate lower class people into submission for the elite makes Igor a class traitor. He shifts seamlessly from his clumsy capture of Ani to confidently destroying the candy shop where Vanya’s friends work with a metal bat.

Whether Ani becomes more clear-eyed about her relationship to power, men and money throughout the film is questionable. After her marriage is finally dissolved by Vanya’s disapproving parents, she is about to turn in for her last night in the mansion when she, seemingly out of nowhere, accuses Igor of having “rape eyes.” Her accusation incriminates the camera’s unsubtle interest in Igor’s long glances at Ani. Has she experienced his gentle eyes as menacing all along? Her bluster clouds her feelings in melodrama. There is only so much time left in the film for anyone to take her pain seriously.

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Ani’s vulnerabilities in the film’s first act — her marginalized profession, lack of strong connections with family or friends, and poor judgement of Vanya’s character — forebode the horror show lurking in Anora. Watching Ani let her guard down around Vanya felt ominous, not romantic. Her trajectory hews closer to the dumb sluts who get whacked first in slasher films than the Pretty Woman figure who stumbles upon a client ready to take care of her in the ways he knows best. The creeping terror ignites when Garnick and Igor arrive at the family mansion, followed by Toros just minutes later, and Vanya drives off without Ani, leaving her at the mercy of three strange men.

The camera does not inhabit her eyes to reveal the terrifying reality of this scene. Instead, we observe the ensuing physical struggle between Ani and Toros, Garnick, and Igor through a wide angle shot. Igor blocks her escape out the back door, apparently surprised by her aggressive response to their demand that she sign a legal document against her will. Ani turns frenetic, breaking Garnick’s nose and biting Igor in the struggle. She may be fighting tooth and nail for control over her life but the scene circumvents empathy for her by inviting the audience to laugh at the screwball energy between her three captors. The men are presented as bumbling and incompetent even as they physically dominate her and she acquiesces under duress.

When Igor grabbed a phone cord to tie Ani’s hands behind her back I had a chilling flashback to the night I met a club customer at his hotel and he blocked me from leaving the room when our time was up. I watched his eyes scanning the room for an improvisational weapon while he gripped my arm. A lamp, a small ottoman, a phone. The visceral terror in this memory shocked me with a clarity of perspective. I cried quietly in the back row of the theater, nauseated by the audience's laughter when Garnick arrived at the mansion to find Ani bound and bent over by Igor. Toros directs him to untie her, though his hostility remains resolute enough to then direct Igor to steal her wedding ring from her hand. Crystallized by the moment she repetitively yells “rape!” to the goons’ bewilderment, Ani’s fear is sublimated into feminine histrionics. The camera cuts to a close up of her screaming mouth, encouraging the audience to identify with the men in their mission to get this unruly woman under control by gagging her with a red scarf.

Customers came into my old Dallas strip club to be entertained, I thought. What if watching half-naked young women fighting off men was part of the entertainment? It looks comical, doesn’t it, the way a scantily clad woman kicks and screams and throws punches against men twice her size? I mulled over the possibility that my fear in those moments, like Ani’s, was entirely internal, contained in my corporeal form and emptied of the potential to provoke sympathy or intervention from the people around me. Maybe the average observer could not interpret my being forced to physically defend myself against slobbering, drunk men as anything more than comedic fodder. The revelation weighed on me so heavily I had a difficult time focusing on the transition to their search for Vanya around Brighton Beach.

Their search ends where it should have begun: the strip club where Ani and Vanya met. Ani finds Vanya in a private room with her former coworker/nemesis, Diamond, who taunts her about her failed marriage. Their rivalry culminates in a knock-down, drag-out fight while the other strippers abandon their posts on the lap dance assembly line to form a crowd and gawk. Visibly breaking under the torrent of humiliation and pain, Ani nurses her wounds privately in the car. She has finally found Vanya and she is all alone in her misery.

Anora’s villain, Vanya’s castrating mother, Galina, finally arrives in her private jet. Ani greets Vanya’s mother in Russian with the same cloying baby voice she used in her introduction to Vanya. Galina scoffs at Ani’s attempt to endear herself as a daughter-in-law. Determined to disabuse Ani of the hope that a prostitute could ever become a part of her elite family, Galina threatens to destroy Ani’s whole life if she does not comply with the annulment. The threat prompts Ani to board the plane to Nevada but Galina’s menacing edge is tempered by ambiguous stakes. What does Ani stand to lose, exactly? She readily abandoned the life in question for a man she knew for 10 days. We do not know what she cherished about her life or what attachments anchored her to it before marrying Vanya.

The Ani we met in the opening sequence has been broken down with violence, humiliation, and threats from people far more powerful than she. Once she has signed the annulment, Igor audaciously suggests Vanya apologize to Ani. Galina rejects the idea on Vanya’s behalf, mocking the notion that a prostitute has any right to one. Vanya’s final words to Ani, “Thank you for making my last trip to America so fun,” indicate their marriage was another one of his party boy misadventures. Ani takes one last dig at Galina, telling her Vanya hates her so much he married a prostitute just to piss her off. Although she spent the duration of the film responding to the term with great offense, Ani refers to herself as a “prostitute” here as a form of revenge. It’s all she has to take satisfaction in after she has otherwise surrendered.

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From this moment on, the film shifts tonally. Igor chaperones Ani back to New York and secures the ten thousand dollars she was promised for her silence and discretion. Back in the mansion’s living room together, Ani confronts Igor about his mistreatment of her — a claim he disputes.The reverence for her glimmering in his eyes throughout the film does not translate into his reckoning with the harm he caused her. He believes his good intentions outweigh her right to feel aggrieved about him having her bound, bent over, and pleading in terror. He only did it for a paycheck. His request for Vanya to apologize to Ani rings hollow in light of his refusal to do the same. Igor then insists on his preference for her government name, Anora, over her chosen nickname, Ani. Infatuation with your “real” name is the tell-tale sign of a man looking for a cheap, effortless shortcut to feeling intimate with a sex worker, who is himself a horror beyond my comprehension.

The claustrophobic tension in the final scene, snow falling around Igor’s car while the two of them linger inside, frames the end of Ani’s journey. I’m anxious for her to get out of the car, go inside her home and take solace in the ability to cry or sleep or eat, whichever one she needs most urgently, on her own terms. She has been isolated without the dignity of privacy for too long.

Instead, Igor opens his palm to reveal her wedding ring. She takes the ring with a long pause and climbs on top of him in the front seat without saying a word. When he moves forward to kiss her, his hands gripping her forearms, she pulls back and hits him in the chest before collapsing in sobs. He holds her in his arms, speechless. The credits roll to the sound of his windshield wipers swishing back and forth rhythmically. 

Ani never gets out of the car. She does not get to experience relief in freedom post-capture. We finally see her broken, but her crumbling is not a catharsis. Ani uses the last gasp of struggle she has left to reject Igor’s advances. He is not a source of comfort but rather proof of her failure to take control of her life. 

Anora could not be a love story. No one had any reason to believe Ani’s whirlwind romance was going to last, much less fulfill her dreams of class ascendency. The horror of Anora lies in our ability to empathize with the gendered suffering of sex workers and the relentless humiliation of fighting for a man who doesn’t love you without the consolation of coping on your own terms or experiencing the support of people who know and care about you.

Although there are multiple interpretations of Ani’s trajectory throughout the film and what she might do after returning home, what I cannot understand is why Sean Baker dedicated Anora to “all sex workers past, present and future” in his acceptance speech when it won the Palme d'Or. Anora is predicated on regressive stereotypes about sex workers: in this telling, we’re crass, impulsive, and pathologically sexual. This premise could be forgiven — there are plenty of characters whose bad behavior humanizes them into complex beings — if not for the ending’s baffling implication that it must be emotionally groundbreaking when a man shows a modicum of care towards a sex worker because sex workers have little experience being loved and cared for. What kind of love story could we expect for the broken down, unloved sex worker?

Whatever satisfaction I could have derived from the representation of sex workers in film is suffocated by the condescension of liberal representation politics wherein marginalized people are depicted as most authentic in states of suffering. Sex workers are corrupted, made less, by capitalism’s devaluation of our humanity. Market liberalism and its progressive-minded adherents accept us as workers in order to efficiently exploit us. Yes, sex workers are workers, and the workers' role in this system is toiling for the ruling class. Anora conceives of our exploitation and abuse as the most relevant factors in understanding who we are as human beings. Look at how broken sex workers are by capitalism, the film says, as if society did not already treat us as broken, exploited objects. In Anora the sex worker is exactly who society thinks she is. 

The phrase “sex work is work” has become something of a liberal tick, a knee-jerk response from establishment figures in politics, media and the arts to acknowledge the shifting social attitudes around prostitution without asserting material gains like decriminalizing sex work or codifying legal and civil protections for sex workers. Or, in Baker’s case, to avoid giving us a complex depiction of a sex worker. Instead, Anora embodies the dehumanizing consumer fantasy of a devoted worker who loves the consumer so much she does not conceive of her servitude as labor. 


Marla Cruz is a sex worker and writer from Texas who lives in Los Angeles.