By Ava Caradonna. Originally published at OpenDemocracy.
Anora, this year’s feisty update on the 1990 film Pretty Woman, has become something of a critical darling. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Palme d’Or. Its lead, Mikey Madison, has been tipped to win best actress at the Oscars. And The Guardian just named it one of 2024’s best films.
Watching Anora as a sex worker, I found it a welcome departure from the long list of reactionary and misogynist portrayals of workers in the sex industry. It’s certainly not a perfect film, and reviewers have been particularly split over the meaning of the last scene (there are dozens of takes on this).
But the plotline isn’t what sets Anora apart. The film’s representation of the work of sex is a quiet, radical act, and for that it deserves its accolades.
Most cultural products grappling with sex work fail to show even minimal respect to sex workers. We are made fun of, portrayed as dumb, vilified, blamed for our own misfortune, and abused without end. Many characters are simply killed off to hammer home the myth that overtly transactional relationships are inherently more dangerous than being a wife or girlfriend.
Anora has both violence and humour. But its eponymous main character, a Brooklyn stripper and sometimes escort who “goes by Ani”, wasn’t put on screen to be comic relief – or a moral lesson for the audience. She’s a class-conscious, modern-day Cinderella, and the story she tells revolves around her short, action-packed relationship with Ivan, an immature, entitled, and obscenely rich son of a Russian oligarch. It’s fun – a riot of colour and sharp editing that mixes rom-com lines with gangster comedy antics.
But pervading it all is the work of sex: the daily grind of selling services packaged as fantasies on a piece rate. In Anora, sex work is presented with complexity. For instance, the small displays of the whorearchy were interesting and pretty accurate. Ani may be played by a civvie actress (someone without lived experience of the sex industry), but the film’s directors paid sex workers to consult on the script and production. The result is one of the most nuanced representations of sex work ever to be put on film.
Nothing About Us Without Us
The insistence on being included has long been a demand of the sex worker rights movement. A rallying call when it comes to the creation of government policies that directly impact sex workers, ‘nothing about us without us’ is also a clear demand on films, exhibitions and documentaries that attempt to represent sex work.
Sex workers demand a seat at the table because so few people have a realistic understanding of what it’s like to actually work in the sex industry. Society has long held a morbid fascination with the lives, and more accurately the bodies, of sex workers. But the way that sex work is policed and imagined traps sex workers as either objects of fantasy or bodies to be condemned, and it fundamentally prevents empathy and warps all comprehension. Sex workers need to speak for themselves as a corrective to this. We need to speak for ourselves because the conversation is about us.
The migrant sex worker rights collective the x:talk project, which formed in London in 2006, sum it up well:
As workers in the sex industry we are often denied a voice, we are considered only passive victims, we are taught to be ashamed of our work, we are made invisible by discriminatory laws that illegalise our work and us, and we are spoken for and about but rarely are we allowed to speak for ourselves.
We can tell from the very first scene that Anora’s director, Sean Baker, listened when his sex worker advisors spoke. The film opens in Headquarters, the strip club Ani works at, and uses a montage of clips to take us through the repetitive work of hustling for customers and servicing their desires. Smile, dance, repeat.
We also see the dynamics between workers – the good, the bad and the ugly – as well as the economics between the dancers and the club. Chewing gum, vapes and the same clothes being taken on and off feature heavily. On her break, Ani eats homemade food out of a Tupperware, jokes about her customers, and complains about the DJ with her colleagues. Later on, she tells her boss that only when he gives her a pension, health benefits and insurance can decide when and how she works.
Such scenes not only directly tackle Ani’s working conditions as a stripper. They also provide an insight into the decades of labour organising in strip clubs, not only in America but also across Britain. In most strip clubs, workers are falsely considered to be ‘self-employed’ or ‘freelancers’. They must commonly pay “house fees” to work – in London upwards of £150 per night – while receiving none of the benefits of an employment contract, like guaranteed minimum wage, paid sick and annual leave, a pension plan, or maternity leave.
Strip clubs are one of the few businesses that make money simply by having workers turn up to work. The scene of Ani pushing back against her boss, who is attempting to impose the discipline of the wage without the benefits of an employment contract, could never have been in the original Pretty Woman. Its inclusion is a testament to 25 years of organising by a sex worker rights movement that has always insisted that one does not have to love one’s job to deserve labour rights.
Fantasies for Sale
Film has always depicted a fantasy of what sex work is and who it involves. Anora gets a lot closer than most, but perhaps the biggest misconception of sex work is that it’s actually even more mundane, repetitive and boring than even this film suggests. Strip clubs are often dead, with more women working than customers on the floor. Hours are spent sitting around in brothels, watching daytime television and waiting for clients to arrive. The labour of removing body hair is endless, and endlessly annoying, while making small talk with strangers for hours can make you feel insane.
There is also the fundamental paradox that sex work often requires mimicing non-commodified intimacy. Clients suspend their disbelief, allowing themselves to think that workers ‘want’ to be there, that they find them attractive, and that the question of money is only secondary, even though they’re paying for the privilege. The girlfriend experience, a common service offered by escorts, is the epitome of this. Of course this fantasy goes only one way: from the worker’s point of view, money is the central relation structuring the transaction. Anora gives us a rare window into what inhabiting this performance and its paradox entails.
Cinderella is a fairy tale about a woman freed from the drudgery of work through love and marriage. Pretty Woman copied it, as has Anora, but it’s a story arc that’s hardly exclusive to sex workers. As the plot of most rom-coms, it’s a dominant gender discourse that reveals how heterosexual relationships are imagined and promotes the idea that all girls (good and bad) are waiting to be swept away (or rescued depending on their class location) by an appropriately wealthy prince.
But while Ani the character indulges in elements of this fantasy, Anora the film grapples with the deceptions inherent in the quest for class mobility and pushes against some of the discomforting aspects of the institution of marriage and being a wife. In Anora the slipper is replaced by a four-carat ring, and we are asked to consider just how stable and pure the marriage contract really is. We are also compelled to interrogate the rags to riches story within the context of the chaos, stigma and shame associated with being a whore and also the gendered inverse, the male gangsters who are also just doing it for the money.
The eventual demise of Ani and Ivan’s relationship also reflects the reality of how the Cinderella fantasy is structured by power relations. Clients will promise you the world, profess their love as long as that world is tightly constrained to hotel rooms and private spaces. When their position in society, their proximity to their class, wealth and heteronormativity is threatened, they will drop you as fast as they can.
Anora doesn’t provide the easy, happily-ever-after ending found in traditional fairy tales, but the breakdown of Ani and Ivan’s relationship has a certain inevitability. It serves as a cautionary tale of the disposability of service workers and the violence at the heart of the nuclear family and the inheritance of wealth. Throughout the whole film there is a tension between the self-awareness of inhabiting and performing a risky Cinderella fairy tale, and the compulsion to escape to the grind of neoliberal work.
I went to see this film and found it coldly unmoving. Supposed to be a romantic comedy, but instead it is a sordid, humourless cliched mess pitting sleazy American sex workers against cardboard Russian caricatures. Shame as I thought his previous film, Tangerine, was very good with sympathetic characters.
It was not at all supposed to be a romantic comedy though it was sometimes advertised that way. The idea that this is an update of Pretty Woman is insane, more like a repudiation of it.
But agreed, I was shocked but not surprised by yet another horrible depiction of Russians.
Sean Baker is a great director and this film is well made, but the content of this film…
The depictions of sex work were absolutely shot in a way meant to titillate, so in a fundamental way, they were not from the workers’ perspective.
This is have your cake and eat it, elite approved, Twitter/Tumblr 21st century liberalism: Russophobia, denigration of religion, celebration of sex work, noticing inequality without suggesting anything be done about it.
Edited to add: anyone who uses the phrase “Russian oligarch” in the 21st century immediately discredits themselves. Thanks to Putin, Russia is less oligarchic in its government than the US.
Call it what you will but it’s still the commodification of flesh and loneliness.
Drug dealing is work too I suppose. I’m sure drug dealers also see themselves as businessmen giving people what they want…