Thoughts on Anora (2024)

After only seeing two of his films, I am completely sold on Sean Baker as a filmmaker. His choice of subject matter and how he handles the human struggle is just done with such tact and sensitivity.

I have often seen sex workers portrayed in film entirely as one-note roles: they're either throwaway characters in crime stories, or living entirely tragic lives, or jokes in stoner comedies, or reduced to little more than an avenue to explore larger themes of sin/vice and eroticism.

Instead, Baker elects to focus on the perspectives of the frequently dehumanised and renders their struggles and lives in full vibrancy; he takes these characters that occupy this strange existence and fills them with colour, his movies are funny, yes, but none of the comedy comes from playing sex workers as the butt of the joke.

In Anora, he comments on the general lack of sensitivity Hollywood has had with it's depictions of sex work by creating an inversion of the premise of Pretty Woman (arguably its most egregious offender). Pretty Woman gives us a story in which a rich man swoops in and "rescues" a woman from a terrible classless life she's trapped in. Anora spins this into an exploration of the class divide, depicting the lack of regard or compassion towards people of the working class from those that are rich. Ivan is free to piss away his father's wealth with no repercussions, but that isn't a reality for anyone who has had to work for a living. For Igor, Anora.. even Toros and Garnick that have been in service for years and years, they have to occupy the back of the plane, unseen and silent.

Anora covers the tragically interesting dynamic of attitudes towards sex work and the life that sex workers have to lead. From lust-filled stares to disgusted sneers. Sex becomes transactional and loses some of its sentimentality, through the constant hustle you have to subject yourself to in order to survive. But that's only just Anora's story.

In Baker's choice to focus on the sex worker's perspective across his body of work, it seems like he is making a conscious statement: that one experience should not define the treatment of any theme or lifestyle and to do so would be reductive.

fantastic

Originally posted on Letterboxd on 18 December 2024