Spoilers ahead.

MANILA, Philippines – When Sean Baker copped this year’s Palme d’Or, the top prize at Cannes Film Festival, for his latest independent title Anora, he closed his speech by devoting the win to “all sex workers, past, present, and future.” It was only natural for the director to do so, considering the narrative focus of his past four films: sex work.

Starlet (2012) involves characters, including the lead, who are adult film stars. In Tangerine (2015), Baker takes a stab at painting the storied subcultures of Los Angeles by tracking the inner lives of transgender sex workers of color inhabiting the city. In The Florida Project (2017), a single mother is forced to peddle her body to provide for her daughter and continue living in a day-rate motel. Then enters Red Rocket (2021), about a cunning ex-porn star returning to his Texas hometown, where he finds a renewed yet warped sense of self.

In Anora, now screening at QCinema International Film Festival, Baker moves to New York to untangle the story of the titular character (Mikey Madison, in a meteoric rise), who lives in Brighton Beach, in real life a known Russian-expat community south of Brooklyn, but works at a Manhattan strip club – a story spiked with fisticuffs, madcap humor, and tons of steamy encounters. 

Ani, as she prefers to go by, glows like the waves of glitter she affixes to her hair, does not back away from catty exchanges, especially when prodded, and often wears her charm like a badge of honor (“honor,” by the way, is what the name Anora translates to in Latin, a site of meaning on its own). 

She later meets Ivan Zakharov (Mark Eydelshteyn), aka Vanya, an infinitely spoiled man-child and son of a Russian oligarch. The frisky twenty-one-year-old easily gets smitten with the intoxicating presence of Ani, who’s only two years ahead of him and knows how to speak Russian, thanks to her Uzbek grandmother.

Vanya, on a whim, invites Ani to his family’s Brooklyn mansion, boasting a breathtaking waterfront scenery, which, reports Variety, was actually designed and built for a real Russian oligarch and was found by Baker by Googling “the biggest and best mansion in Brighton Beach.” There the nearly star-crossed lovers have “furious jumping,” as Bella Baxter of Poor Things would call it. 

Soon, Vanya asks Ani to be exclusive with him for a week, in exchange for fifteen thousand dollars, and so begins the whirlwind, luxurious life the latter has never wrapped her head around, which eventually leads to a private-jet trip to Sin City, Las Vegas, Nevada, capped off by a shotgun wedding.

Little did Ani know that she’s in for a fight, literally and figuratively, so as to maintain this veneer of a perfect life, as Vanya’s parents get wind of their impulsive marriage and, suffused with ire, hastily send the erratic Toros (Karren Karagulian) to process an annulment, send the hooker packing, and take their son back to Russia. 

Tagging alongside him is fellow Armenian American Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan), and the observant Russian, Igor (Yura Borisov, in a stellar supporting turn). Of course they collide with Ani in a rather long, farcical juncture of the film, which sees Vanya fleeing on foot and later going on a nightclub crawl to de-stress.

And so the manhunt ensues, as the group, with Ani in tow, scours the neighborhood, the city, and its underbelly before Vanya’s parents set foot on American soil, turning the story into an unlikely road movie, one that invites the audience to rally behind the protagonist and briskly exposes the facade to which her optimism hinges on, with Madison’s soulful, unbridled talent shining through. It’s palpable that the role, reveals the director, is tailored for her.

Baker’s mounting chiefly reaps benefits from the locations – strip club, mansion, hotel suites, candy shop, malls, and whatnot – that have long been part and parcel of his lexicon as screenwriter and director, drawing closer attention to the many inner lives such spaces inhabit and vice versa. It’s a mounting that is replete with screwball kineticism, which suits the panache of Drew Daniels’ lensing. 

But, contrary to his previous projects on such a familiar topic, Baker’s gaze here does not buckle. If anything, I read Anora in the same vein as Ruben Östlund’s also Palme-laurelled satirical comedy, Triangle of Sadness, albeit the latter being more loud with its philosophical pronouncements. The parallels are evident in the way Baker is keen to stress points of discussion instead of allowing the audience discern it, such as the whole exchange between Ani and Igor about rape, the abrupt Gen Z remark, or the explicit articulation of the provenance of his protagonist’s birth name, which pares down its symbolism.

Past this, the peaks and nadirs are crystal clear and tied more to dramatic logic than an interval for reflection that you could almost sense the endnote from miles ahead. It’s not that it’s a glaring problem, really; it has to do more with the leeway for possibilities that has informed Baker’s body of work, at least in the last decade, that is sorely missed in Anora.

Perhaps this could in part be explained by him also serving as producer here, which isn’t the first time he has done so, and yet you could feel how this particular creative hat towers over the film. I’ll go so far as to say that Baker has intended to write Anora as an Oscar movie, and the title is on track to achieving that golden objective, considering its Cannes win, its box office success, and the near-unanimous international critical renown it enjoys. 

Critics are as well quick to single out the title’s supposed turning of the Cinderella fairy tale on its head, and even that is a concession to the types of movies awards pundits, especially in Hollywood, would usually recognize; that a work has to respond to some sort of classic imagery or stock conventions for it to be relatable.

To Baker’s credit, though, there is still the gesture of care and dignity he often extends to his characters. He knows better than to ghettoize these portrait of lives existing on the fringes. And what he says about sex as currency, transactional love, class, labor, and identity still hacks through ongoing, large-scale conversations about it.

But his gaze is nearly unmitigated in ways that Ani continues to exist in terms of the men around her, and Baker feels the urge to rescue her, or at least implies that, with Igor acting as a proxy for the director, like some white deus ex machina present to nurse all the pain and hardship she’s put up with. 

That’s why the film’s coda, even in its crippling exactitude, reads to me as only an emotional release Baker has long set up — first for himself, then for Ani, and, finally, the audience. In this latest assertion, the leap into possibilities, to borrow the words of filmmaker Miryam Charles, “seems to be out of reach— somewhere far into the future, always in a more distant time.” – Rappler.com

Anora’s final screening is scheduled on November 15, 2024, 8:30 PM at Power Plant Cinema 6.