What Anora does right and wrong regarding sex workers

As someone who worked as an exotic dancer, I’m a harsh critic when it comes to cinematic strippers, with my own set of credibility metrics. Magic Mike trying to finance a business with wads of cash tied with rubber bands? Check. “Closer” by Nine Inch Nails in a key dance scene Magic Mike XXL continuation? Check. Baroque manicure Zola? (Checks his nails.) Check. Nomi Malone licks stripper pole Showgirls? Two acrylic-tipped thumbs point down. Yes. Never in a million years.

Now it’s writer/director Sean Baker’s turn. Anorain which the ebullient Mikey Madison plays Anora, or Ani as she prefers to be called, a Brooklyn stripper and sex worker who becomes entangled with Ivan, an adorably capricious man-baby played with irritable perfection by Marc Eidelstein who happens to be the son of a Russian oligarch. Ani and Ivan meet at a strip club where she is dancing. A deal is made between them (her time for his money) and the jokes begin. Billed as a kind hacked story about Cinderella, Anoracinematic progenitor not so much Pretty Woman as Tony Scott True Romance crossed with Martin Scorsese After closing – a rum-dramedy, inflated with fist fights and rough touching.

Before the film was released nationwide, I was cynical about it. Palme d’Or in Cannes, 98 percent rating on Rotten TomatoesAnd Oscar hype. Another dude author trying to get credit for sex work (see also: Striptease, Exotic)? Try me brother. But from the first shot inside the club, with Ani hard at work on what looks like a lap dance assembly line, I could tell Baker was locked in: strip club social dynamics and labor issues, stripper aesthetics and argot, all artfully processed. He thought through every detail, from Anya’s patient smile to her micro-thong. And Madison caught me with one word: No.

As the film opens, we see Ani floating smoothly through a busy club, looking for clients interested in a lap dance, two or twelve. She has some hits, but it’s the misses that get me – when a client rejects her. proposal to dance, Ani raises her eyebrows and says: “No?” The smooth saying of “no”, the girlish deference that also makes a man reconsider his decision, opened up a deep sensory memory deep in my retired hustler bones. I have said—and lived out—this “no” thousands of times.

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In the first minutes, Ani bravely answers the customers’ terrible questions. She’s sweet, bubbly, determined, and her polished flirting and smooth moves show the mark of a true professional, from pole work to classic stripper hair tossing. At the moment when the manager challenges Ani to dance for a client (the fateful Ivan) who has requested a girl who speaks Russian, she is in the dressing room eating food brought from home. (Some viewers were delighted by this mundane detail: strippers eating out of Tupperware! They’re just like us!)

From that moment on, you’re rooting for her. Me, the ultimate grumpy movie stripper I am, was rooting for her… until we see Ani in a separate room with Ivan, giving him a lap dance while chewing gum. In too many Hollywood portrayals sex workerschewing gum is used as a base designation: “Look at this whore showing us her animal nature, chewing her chewing gum” We get it: chewing gum, with its amazing, popping bubbles, represents a deviation from the bourgeois way of life. But in real life, the pickiest club managers don’t want you chewing gum while you’re on the floor: A) they think it’s “unclassy” and B) they don’t want your Doublemint stuck in their precious beer. – a wet, glow-in-the-dark carpet. However, I remembered that Ani had just eaten and probably wanted to make sure her breath was fresh. Proforma striptease hygiene. All is forgiven.

After Ivan convinces Ani to meet him outside of work, she shows up the next day at his colorful seaside mansion with bags under her eyes and a bandaged dress revealing bruises on her legs. This is where I completely abandoned my respect: even though the best makeup artists were willing to do the job of concealment, Baker knew that in order to keep it real, Anya’s body had to have these marks – hickeys on the pole, kisses on the pole . , party bumps, whatever you want to call them – on her legs and thighs. By consulting with working strippers and hiring them as actors in the production, Baker showed that his attention to authenticity was his glue. This little detail proves it. (To illustrate how this dedication was received, at a special screening of a film about sex workers in September, dancers in the audience clapping their heels in gratitude.)

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Anora is about class, about loyalty and, most of all, about two young men testing the limits of the forms of power given to them with the help of loads of money and a triad of thugs who complicate things, sometimes to the point of being hilarious. When Ivan’s family discovers that he and Ani got married during a whirlwind trip to Las Vegas, they demand an annulment. Sex worker wife for their loser? Oh my God, no! What initially appears to be a Cinderella story is exposed as a Faustian bargain with the addition of a sable coat.

By the time the storyline deviates from the club, the authenticity is no longer so much in the detailed details of sex work, but in the clear differences between the “haves” and the “have-nots”, with the haves being able to run (literally) from their problem, and the have-nots are tasked with either cleaning (also literally) or being chased. Supported by wealth and connections, Ivan can easily move on. What about Anya?

Stigma is the silent third party in a relationship. Strippers don’t often deal directly with criminalization, but stigma can make many practical issues, such as banking, housing, direct employment and child custody, insidious. Any stripper knows that it is better not to try to get an apartment or a bank loan by indicating the word “stripper” in the “occupation” column on an application. What’s at stake is not just social capital, but your fundamental legitimacy as a citizen, a state that can make a person feel at least vulnerable, and at worst, trapped. It’s no wonder that the fantasy of rising above it all by marrying Ivan—a unicorn client who was young, handsome, rich, outgoing, and spontaneous—allured the pragmatic Ani.

Baker’s acceptance speech for the Palme d’Or he took the opportunity to talk about reducing the stigma of sex work. He dedicated the award to “all sex workers past, present and future.” a refreshing tribute after decades of directors and actors stocking shelves of awards for stories about sex workers without any recognition. (Fun fact: The first Academy Award for Best Actress was awarded in 1928 to Janet Gaynor for her performance in three films, including Street Angelin which she played a working girl.) Does this make Sean Baker the voice of sex workers? Absolutely not. But he is an ally who insists that the work – always controversial, sometimes messy and never easy – is legitimate. Ambitious? Not for most. But real.

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Sex work as the epitome of consumerism, the pursuit of the American Dream, and/or labor under capitalism are tropes that, like fictional stripper gum, have been stretched out quite a bit by now: “We’re all prostitutes/Everyone has a price” is lyrics from the pop group’s 1979 song “We’re All Prostitutes,” for God’s sake. I believe that people who are caught up in this tinny Marxist analysis enjoy feeling like naughty provocateurs without paying any real price for transgression. All the talk. No walking. In PR stunts and interviews, Baker and his actors at least nod to the fact that the stakes for being a stripper are different than writing a movie about a stripper or playing the role of a stripper.

Critics have been kind to indie king Baker, whose creation includes several films in which sex work of one kind or another takes center stage. As some have noted, the thematic focus does give me a strange moralistic undertone – What happened to this? — but so far the work seems more sincere than sensational. I can’t blame him, really. Sex work is a colorful world, no less colorful than the more frequented themed grounds of crime and warfare.

As a stripper, I was so used to being picked and judged in the club, and to asking for understanding, for the slightest shred of respect outside the club. This time I am the arbiter of legitimacy. I can choose to lavish the coin of admiration and approval as I wish. Seeking participation, confirmation and, I will even say, read Baker made not only a compelling film about sex workers, but also a paradigm-shifting film. How nice that, for a change, the appreciation is mutual. Who could refuse this?