Under the Table

Sam Bodrojan considers “Anora” and the emasculated sadism of Sean Baker.

By Sam BodrojanJanuary 5, 2025

• Film

• Gender & Sexuality

“WHY WOULDN’T YOU have raped me?” Mikey Madison’s Anora hurls this question at her Russian handler as she stands above him. She’s bleary-eyed, in an oversize T-shirt, and he’s sprawled on the couch smoking a cigarette, still smiling from a joke he made earlier. She has spent the past 36 hours in a state of confusion, terror, and total helplessness, and the three weeks before that in a whirlwind romance. Now it’s quiet, and the house is mostly empty, and all the broken glass has been cleaned up.

Five minutes from closing credits, writer-director Sean Baker holds the camera on Anora’s face, her mouth half-open, glaring at a man she barely knows. She’s goading him, begging him to admit that he would—that he wanted it. Before this scene, it would be a little hard to say what Anora is about, without simply listing the choices the film makes: the emphasis on class differences between the characters, the Russian-Armenian infighting, the use of the term “independent contractor.” The clearest choice, though, is the one Baker has made with every film for the past 12 years: Anora is about a sex worker.

When questioned in interviews about his persistent inclusion of erotic laborers in his films, Baker gives an admirably firm, sneakily irrelevant answer about how it’s important to destigmatize the profession through art, that sex work is work, that he supports decriminalization. As for why he revisits the subject constantly, insistently, despite the wide tonal and thematic range of his projects, Baker has never said explicitly, though the result is obvious: they are a useful rhetorical shorthand.

The Sex Worker—as an allegorical figure, not as a person or a group—is a complex subject who has for decades been the focus of critical theory and labyrinthine political discourse. Baker’s invocation of this archetype, however, is far easier to grasp. Baker has two competing impulses. One is that of the schmaltzy humanist, biased towards transparent plays at sympathy under the veneer of American indie realism. The other is that of the freak who edges toward cruel, perverse wish fulfillment.

The Sex Worker, in Baker’s films, is not a real person. They are a figure whose work and life form a symbol in which intimacy and transaction are one and the same, their bodily interface with capital necessarily followed by an emotional interface with a social condition his films have no desire to explain. These are people trapped by their jobs because their jobs serve as the core metaphor for their life. Though his movies never outright demonize the profession, ugly misconceptions about sex workers crop up constantly. Starlet (2012), about the friendship between an elderly woman and a young camgirl, suggests that working in porn is incompatible with female solidarity. Tangerine (2015) trains a phone camera on two street workers to prove its own realness, even as it uses the marginalized status of its protagonists to excuse a push into awkwardly heightened hysterics. The Florida Project (2017) is gorgeously photographed poverty porn, using its focus on children to distract from its patronizing view of the young single mother who lives in a motel. Making a dancer or an escort or an online model the vessel for Baker’s messaging gives him room to cut psychological corners and distract from the troubling implications of his work.

Baker’s first three films have the makings of a mondo picture: despite their concern-trolling sappiness, they cannot help but reify the ugliest narratives about the disenfranchised. Trans women are manufactured and delusionally theatrical, in order to cope with being tossed aside by the world; young mothers who do criminalized work to support their children are irresponsible victims; young women in general must learn to stop using their sexuality as a tool if they are to experience real care. Sex workers, no matter their specific characterization, must be emblematic of unresolved social ills. The approach allows for an easy centrist catharsis, one with wide audience appeal. The overlapping dialogue, the interstitial moments of small kindness, and the production design all signal that these are compassionate films with a message, despite often mimicking the worldview of a sexploitation picture.

Baker’s early work fails because the kinds of women he centers serve fundamentally different functions in the two genres from which he draws most of his inspiration: X-rated trash and Sundance micro-dramas. In the former, they are playthings; in the latter, they are cautionary tales. Thus we find the contradiction at the heart of Baker’s work: the Sex Worker cannot be evil, yet the world’s evil must be encapsulated by the Sex Worker.

Baker’s oeuvre is uniformly concerned with audience surrogacy, the questionable allure of living through another. The audience lives through the protagonists just as the protagonists live through the sex workers. This nasty sleight of hand allows for psychological transference in the name of superficial representation. Any erotic laborer must be a blank slate for the surrounding dramatic engine to run; the director’s style of drama cannot withstand making them real people. Thus, Baker is incapable of recognizing the fact that such sympathy is actually an act of dehumanization no different from his sensationalist proclivities.

Red Rocket (2021) was Baker’s first film to directly engage the more sinister implications of such narrative devices. The movie asks a simple question: what if you were a guy who could do whatever he wanted? Simon Rex’s Mikey, a former porn star and loathsome analogue for Trump, carries himself with the enviable joie de vivre of total privilege. Although Mikey is a former porn star, he is not the film’s Sex Worker, rhetorically. That onus falls on an underage girl groomed by Mikey into becoming a porn star herself. This is a gnarly gambit, indulging the thrills of instrumentalizing others for your own fantasy. But the urge to punish Mikey—to be correct—once again kneecaps the film when it should be getting really mean. Red Rocket asks a simple question, but it is afraid to answer it honestly. By shifting the focus in the final moments to Mikey’s pathetic delusions of grandeur, the film can’t capture the sick fun or self-flagellation of its sleazy predecessors, while also lacking the thematic infrastructure to properly condemn him in the name of some moral credibility.

This is not to say that Baker’s movies are unaccomplished. The Florida Project, especially, is a deeply moving reclamation of realities that the entertainment conglomerates have wrongly deemed unworthy of romanticization. It is to say, however, that he is trying to play Russian roulette with a fully loaded gun. His movies are necessarily reactionary if you follow them to any kind of ideological endpoint, so when Baker tries to steer his narratives in more respectable directions, it feels like an artistically dishonest, politically flat resolution.

Anora, winner of the 2024 Palme d’Or at Cannes and an Oscar front-runner, makes a few meaningful revisions to Baker’s archetypes and dramaturgical methods. Firstly, Madison’s eponymous dancer is the first of his sex workers to be positioned as an aspirational figure. Madison’s performance is not really good or bad, but it is perfect. She has a thick Brooklyn accent, she’s hot, she’s funny, she gives a guy a bloody nose, she yells at a bunch of rich pricks, she spends most of the movie with tinsel in her hair. She is not, at least in the beginning, the object of desire, but a Disney princess.

The first act of the movie finds “Ani” whisked away by Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), a young heir to Russian oligarchy. One night together in a private room at the club where she works leads to a couple of house calls, which leads to a New Year’s Day offer to be his girlfriend for one week for $10,000 (she negotiates up to $15,000), which leads to an impromptu wedding in Las Vegas. Vanya is handsome, with a boyish, gaunt face. He spends most of his time hitting an absolutely disgusting bong and playing video games. He cums fast and does a backward somersault before sex. He is sweet, although we see him constantly toying with the working class people who serve him.

Ani has no sense of self, no personality beyond the spunkiness and beauty that pay her bills. She is as much a cipher for us as she is for her customers, someone onto whom we can project an idolized version of ourselves. When Ani quits her job and yells, “I’m just gonna go chill in my mansion or whatever,” it’s intoxicating. For 43 glorious minutes, the movie has no lesson and its pleasures have no ulterior motive. It is the dream of getting lucky and landing a sweet gig that lets you live well. No matter how foolish an endeavor the audience knows this will turn out to be, the movie never judges Ani for playing along, further entwining herself with Vanya, inevitable controversy and heartache be damned. It is shallow but a cute time. Does the movie feature fully fledged people anywhere, stripper or otherwise? No. Does this have disproportionately more troubling implications for depictions of a criminalized community often portrayed as unintelligent or shallow? Obviously and indefensibly. But Anora is, at least for a little while, Baker’s first movie that feels like it’s uninterested in allegorizing sex work itself.

The Cinderella story comes to a halt once tabloids tip off Vanya’s family to their son’s unseemly marriage. Vanya’s trio of Armenian bodyguards try to get the marriage annulled, as Vanya’s parents fly to the United States to take him back to Russia. After the three barge into the mansion where Vanya and Ani have been living in domestic bliss, things go awry: Vanya flees, leaving Ani to fight off the men who refuse to let her follow. The set piece at the mansion marks the turning point in the film, where it shifts from fairy tale to screwball comedy. From Ani knocking paintings off the wall to Vanya running down the street barely dressed to the Armenian priest/handler constantly checking his phone during a child’s confirmation, the broad comedy on display offers a kind of reassurance—that the film will continue to exist in its own rowdy unreality, that no one will get hurt, not really.

Still, there’s an uncomfortable, sour quality to the circumstances. It’s the way Ani scrambles around in her underwear, hair jostled, when she gets pinned down. It’s the way the camera switches to an extreme close-up when Ani shouts “Rape!” in the hope of getting the neighbors’ attention. It’s the way the henchman Igor (Yura Borisov) binds and gags her before forcefully removing her wedding ring. Baker does everything to assure the audience that this is not a scene where Ani is in real danger, as these men get bruised up by their own incompetence. But the scene is long, nearly 10 minutes, after the film has heretofore played out in brisk montage, thanks to Baker himself sitting in the editing chair.

I mention the uneasiness of this set piece because, for about 80 percent of its runtime, Anora operates as a consummate piece of film craft and entertainment. Dissenting opinions on the film have suggested that it’s sloppy, but I just don’t buy it. Baker’s vaguely ethnographic lens is put to good use here in a setting that can be more easily aestheticized. Vanya’s ragers, the Liquid I.V. offered in a Vegas penthouse, and other surreal nonsense of the ultrawealthy are treated with a bemused awe. The vividly textured clubs, streets, and skylines of the outer boroughs offer plenty of opportunities for some truly inspired mise-en-scène, though I am admittedly a sucker for a movie where you can feel the temperature of a room without being there. It’s a beautifully shot picture, with staging to match.

Over half of the movie is spent watching these four exhausted, injured working class people grow increasingly desperate trying to find the rich failson out on a citywide bender, and yet the suddenly distended sense of time actually makes the film fly by faster. It’s deliriously funny (my favorite bit involves one of the guardians repeatedly asking strangers if they recognize Vanya using a random picture he found on Google). The blocking is evocative and dynamic, like a midcentury studio comedy. After what has felt like a decades-long drought of world-class character actors, Baker keeps stuffing in more of them, as if finding them is no big deal. The plotting is coherent, persuasive, and rapturous. On a moment-to-moment basis, Anora is, for the most part, a pleasure to watch, and an unqualified formal success from a director whose work was previously much better in concept than in execution.

There’s a shift, though, after that scene in the mansion. As soon as Ani is gagged, she loses all agency. From this point on, she is relegated to the role of the unwilling victim, suffering myriad indignities with little to do but take it. Ostensibly, she tags along in the hope of convincing Vanya to stay with her, but any attempt to break from her lot in life is totally futile. Vanya is too plastered, then too cowardly, to ever have a full conversation with Ani again. When she threatens Vanya’s mother with going to court over the divorce—Vanya failed to sign a prenup—his mother simply laughs. She could destroy Ani’s life. Ani has no options here. They get the marriage annulled, and in exchange for her cooperation, she gets $10,000—less than Vanya happily threw away to spend a week with her earlier. With each passing humiliation, it becomes clearer that the film will insist on torturing Ani to the very end. Why Baker is so keen to inflict pain on his heroine, however, takes a bit longer to reveal itself.

Igor is there through it all, as helpless as Ani. His infatuation with her from the moment she punches him is obvious. He often offers her drinks, pills, the very scarf he used to gag her. Whenever Baker cuts to the dashing young man, he is staring at Ani, smiling. At the annulment meeting, he risks his job to request that Vanya apologize to Ani. From the moment of his introduction, Igor is our surrogate, and unlike Ani, he is also Baker’s.

In the last scene, having flown home from Las Vegas, wedding annulment in hand, Igor drops Ani off at her old place in Staten Island. It’s snowing. The car is warm. He gives her back the wedding ring he’d taken from her. She insults his car; she gets out and brings her bags to the porch before returning to it. She kisses Igor and climbs on top of him. He stares at her, his hands holding the back of her head. It’s hard to tell if she’s pulling away or he just wants to look at her. Then she breaks down in tears, collapsing onto his chest. He holds her. The film cuts to black.

This ending is almost dizzyingly upsetting. In the most obvious reading, this working class immigrant, a nice guy who exists in solidarity with and awe of this woman—offers her a trinket of sentimental and monetary value because he cannot offer her anything else. Confronted with an act of real intimacy that still feels transactional, Ani becomes overwhelmed, a moment of crushing reality after the past two hours of high jinks. Such a transparently manipulative maneuver, positioning Madison as a classic American martyr, veers uncomfortably close to the suggestion that any exchange of sex is a traumatizing exploitation for the providers, a stunningly reactionary suggestion for such an ostensibly respectful production. Ani’s naivete, once charming in a more exaggerated context, suddenly feels ludicrous. Depicting a stripper as a victim of her own profession, someone who would not be smart enough to know when she’s being played, is a tired, offensive cliché.

It’s important to emphasize that the movie never asks us to learn anything about the internal life of the title character. Baker has said that her look was inspired by Soledad Miranda’s collaborations with Spanish director Jesús Franco. It seems most apt, then, to compare the character to the star of a film like Franco’s She Killed in Ecstasy (1971). Baker has never created a female sex worker with an internal life, condemning them only to display reactions to their own bad fortune. What’s tricky is that this is not inherently weak writing; the pure reactivity of his heroines only becomes problematic when it is accompanied by lazy stereotypes. If Anora works at all, it is best understood in lineage with films like Franco’s Vampyros Lesbos (1971) or Toshiya Fujita’s Stray Cat Rock series—movies that allow for embodiment and actualization via magnetic performance and an aestheticization of beautiful suffering, guided by the sadistic whims of the director.

Perhaps this is how Anora lands its final moments despite itself. Madison’s gestures, disgust, and unwieldy vulnerability come after she has remained, despite all her kicking and screaming, narratively docile for the entire picture. The film does not require a three-dimensional character to pull this moment off because it is about the pain of not being known, of being used so thoroughly that one loses the ability to orient within the self and one’s own emotions.

Anora is a far darker, sicker movie than it lets on for most of its runtime, one far more nihilistic about the ability of sex workers to achieve agency or empowerment through conventional narrative without it being in some way leering, without the expectation of either sexual or pathological gratification. For the first time in his career, Baker has successfully married his penchant for pity slop with his own emasculated sadism.

In that penultimate scene at the couch, Ani interrogates Igor about their first encounter. “You have rape eyes,” she says. She might as well be talking to Baker himself.

Grilling Igor about their first encounter, Ani seems suddenly afflicted with the same androphobia as Catherine Deneuve in Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965). “Why wouldn’t you have raped me?” she asks. Igor responds, “Because I’m not a rapist.” That’s an easy excuse; it might not even be wrong, but it’s not the truth either. Ani grins at him. “Nope.” We know what she’s thinking before she even says it. “’Cause you’re a faggot-ass bitch.”

Maybe the tragedy is that Ani is too scared of men, or that Igor is just another john—that in his desire to be close to her, for her to let her guard down, he is nearly indistinguishable from Vanya. Igor’s objectification of Anora is cloaked by meekness and tiny offerings, the same way Sean Baker disguises his dehumanizing view of sex workers in respectability politics and American Independent swagger. Whether this belongs in the same bucket of unintended implications as the idea that Ani has been traumatized by something inherent to her chosen line of work ultimately doesn’t matter. The fantasy of being a sex worker is supplanted by the fantasy of getting paid to hang out with a sex worker, and winds up necessitating a narrative humiliation of a sex worker. These structural choices, likely deriving from a need for pungent catharsis, meaningfully complicate the film in ways Baker has previously shirked. For as much as Anora can feel ugly and gross and outright evil, Baker has actually pulled off the kind of film he has been trying to make his entire career. Anora is a work of Capraesque pathos that doubles as a revitalization of vintage schlock. He got his money shot.

All that said, sex workers deserve far more than what Baker could ever offer them, and it is not my place to say whether the movie is “interesting” enough to outweigh its fundamental cruelty. The final shot reads as an acknowledgment that Baker’s approach to representation is a transactional relationship between director and subject. As to what the subject is getting out of it, in this case, I’m not so sure.