Sean Baker’s Anora dismantles Hollywood’s romantic fantasies, offering a sharp, feminist take on power, survival and the myths we tell about women’s lives.
This article was excerpted from Susan Bordo‘s Substack BordoLines.
Sean Baker’s Anora invites our capacities for feelings, not judgment, to accompany one young, female sex worker through a few roller-coaster, genre-defying weeks in her life. Like all of Sean Baker’s films, it refuses an ending that tells us what to think. It doesn’t tie things up and lead us to a morally unambiguous conclusion but to the perfect, emotionally right one. And the magic of it is that it does it without much being said. While the comic parts of the movie, like classic screwball comedies, are full of characters whose talk bumps into each other, jostling for our attention and laughter, the last movement has hardly any dialogue at all. And it will stay with you for a long time.
Last night, this “small,” independent film swept the Oscars, winning Best Picture, Best Director, Best Editing, Best Original Screenplay and Best Actress, and I’m sure that you’ll be reading and hearing lots about it.
It’s been disappointing to see that my two stacks on Anora have gotten far, far less attention than my movie stacks have in the past. Perhaps the horrifying political events of late are partly responsible for that. I know they made it hard for me to write about movies—even this movie that I’ve loved from first viewing.
But I also suspect that many of you hadn’t seen the movie yet. (Before the Oscars, my movie editor friend of mine said, that if it won Best Picture it would be the lowest-grossing picture in Oscar history to do so.) I hope that will change now that the Oscars have celebrated it in the way I’d hardly dared to hope. I’m pretty cynical (or realistic?) about the Oscars and how and why they reward what they reward.
Let me share with you, this time in one condensed stack, some of the writing I’ve done on this film—including my interpretation of that ending.
Sean Baker Deconstructs the Rom Com
It makes for some good review headlines:
“Sean Baker’s ‘Pretty woman’ is a triumph.”
“Mikey Madison’s Modern-Day Take on Pretty Woman is Dazzling.”
“Mikey Madison Blazes in this very modern Pretty Woman tale” … et cetera.
But writer/director Sean Baker wasn’t inspired by Pretty Woman—at least not consciously: In September Baker told IndieWire: “Honestly, I didn’t even pick up on that until halfway through production and somebody called it out and I was like, ‘Oh, okay. Yeah, I see that.’ But I didn’t want it in any way to affect me. I didn’t want to be influenced by it. So I decided to not revisit it and to tell you the truth, I still haven’t revisited it, so I haven’t seen it since 1990.”
If you’re familiar with Baker’s films Tangerine and The Florida Project, you’ll find a much clearer line from his own earlier work to Anora than from Pretty Woman to Anora.
The central characters of Tangerine are two transgender sex workers: Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) is prowling the streets of West LA looking for her cheating boyfriend while her friend Alexandra (Mya Taylor) is picking up a little money while distributing flyers for her appearance that night at a local bar. (She sings “Toyland”—and made me cry.)
The Florida Project follows the adventures of Moonee (Brooklynn Prince), an imaginative, streetwise 6-year-old whose laissez-faire mother Halley (Bria Vinaite), improvising ways to make her rent money, steals and sells tickets to Disneyland and has sex with men in her motel room.
Both films, like Anora, are no-limits raunchy, funny, warm and have segments of everyone-talking-loud-at-once chaos and physical slapstick, then unexpected turns that will haunt you forever. Running through the psyche of all three films are fantasy-worlds imagined as escapes from the hierarchical, crushing realities of hardluck adult life “on the margins.”
So: Sean Baker didn’t wake up one day thinking, “Hey, what about a film about a sex worker with fairy-tale dreams!” But Baker, who was 19 when Pretty Woman was released and a movie buff from an early age, didn’t have to have seen it again for it to be stored somewhere in his memories. The film, and particularly its breakout star Julia Roberts, became (much to the surprise of the cast and director Garry Marshall) both a film and cultural sensation. Audiences were dazzled by Roberts’ mega-watt smile and natural instinct for seemingly un-self-conscious charm. The chemistry between her and Richard Gere was right. And in the 1980’s and early 90’s, Hollywood often tried to incorporate some version of feminism—often by featuring working women struggling with classism, sexism and (less frequently until we were well into the 90’s) racism—into traditionally entertaining formats.
You might be thinking: feminist? Pretty Woman? And for sure, there’s a lot that’s cringe-worthy in 2025. But whatever we think in 2025, the question of how to inject a little feminism into the fairy-tale plot was a subject of concern among the makers of the film. Most notably, Laura Ziskin, the executive producer of the film, wanted the knight-on-horseback finale to end on a note of “equality.”
It’s not untrue to the plot, in which Vivian’s warmth and spontaneity does “rescue” Edward from his life as a work-obsessed head of a company that buys floundering businesses and sells them for parts. But face it, in 2025, it does feel tacked on to make the schmaltzy but entertaining scene more politically correct. The deliberateness seems borne out by the insistence by various members of the creative team (in a 2020 documentary on the movie): “She’s the one making decisions now,” “She’s evolved,” “It’s princess culture coming together with feminist culture.”
Hmmm. Maybe a tad more princess culture than feminist culture. (Or maybe more precisely ‘Julia Roberts culture’; every woman wanted her tousled hairstyle, long legs and gorgeous outfits in the film.)
So: When Peter Debruge, in Vanity Fair, describes Anora as “a subversively romantic, free-wheeling sex farce [that] makes Pretty Woman look like a Disney movie,” it’s truer than he seems to be aware. Pretty Woman is—literally, not just metaphorically—a Disney movie. And Anora is neither.
Anora Is a Comedy That’s Hyper-Aware of the Realities of Power and Hierarchy. Those Realities Deny a Conventional Happy Ending.
Anora—or “Ani,” as she prefers to be called—is an expert lap dancer and sometimes more at a Manhattan strip club, where she meets and captivates Ivan “Vanya” Zakharov, the indulged but charming son (played by the “Russian Timothée Chalamet,” Mark Eydelshteyn) of a rich Russian oligarch. The owner of the club has taken her to him because she speaks Russian. In fact, she can, but doesn’t like to. (Her unpolished accent? A desire to assimilate? Not clear.) A Brighton Beach native of at least part-Russian background, (she had a grandmother who could only speak Russian) she understands everything when it’s spoken.
Unlike Vivian in Pretty Woman, Anora is no newcomer to the big city. She’s been at it for awhile, and is skilled and comfortable with the work. While Vivian’s country-bumpkin residue (which the script constantly emphasizes) reassured 1990 viewers that she’s “not really” a seasoned pro, Ani is unashamed and completely at home with her job. Sean Baker wants that from the viewer, too. He neither judges, condescends or exoticizes.
Vanya invites Ani to his family’s oceanside mansion, first for one night, then for a New Year’s Eve party, then for a week to be his “horny girlfriend,” (15K—some major inflation since Pretty Woman but a virtually identical bargaining scene) before he’s due to return to Russia and buckle down to work for his father’s business.
Anora, while dazzled, remains composed and professional. It’s Vanya who is awkward and shy—in a kind of privileged way—as he skates barefoot across the (marble?) floor of the mansion and eagerly bounds up the stairs to the bedroom, where Vanya throws a comment about the maid’s negligence, then behaves with Ani like a hyperactive toddler with a great new toy. Sexually (and in other ways) he’s still an adolescent: always ready but not very adept (like a “spastic rabbit,” as one reviewer put it).
After Ani teaches him to slow down, Vanya becomes so smitten that he asks her to marry him (and—bonus!—he’ll also get a green card as the husband of an American.) At first she doesn’t believe him—she doesn’t expect marriage proposals—but he seems so guileless and endearingly, inarticulately enthusiastic that it doesn’t take that much to get her to agree.
During the week they’ve spent together, he’s been a terrific (if wild and crazy) boyfriend, much more like someone who has found the girl he wants to go steady with than someone who has hired her to amuse him during his last trip to America. The proposal happens in a huge penthouse in Las Vegas, he insists that he is sincere (“I said it twicely”) and for that moment, it all seems to Ani like a fairy-tale in which anything is possible. (Maybe she’s seen Pretty Woman, too.) Vanya promises to get her a diamond ring with many carats, and they’re off to say their vows.
It’s a whirlwind in Las Vegas, but after they return with a marriage certificate in hand, Ani begins to believe more seriously in her new status in life. She’s got the license, a dazzling ring—she’s a wife!
Harsh reality (and a transition to a different genre) crashes—hilariously for many viewers, not so much for others—into Ani’s possibility of an opulent life in the Zakharov’s mansion when word gets back to his rich, influential parents that their impulsive and frequently stoned son has gotten married. And—bozhe moy!—to a hooker!
They dispatch Vanya’s Armenian godfather Toros (Karren Karagulian) who hands the baby over in the middle of conducting a baptism and speeds to the mansion after his brother Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and Russian “muscle” Igor (Yura Borisov, who was nominated but didn’t win Best Supporting Actor) let him know the rumors are true.
When Toros sends the parents a snap of the marriage certificate, they announce that they are coming to America themselves to fetch their wayward son, who they are used to rescuing from disaster, and get him an annulment. It’s at this moment that Ivan, hearing that his parents are on their way, stops being the prince in the fairytale and runs away like a guilty and scared little kid who’s caught with his hand in the cookie-jar. He doesn’t give a second thought to the fact that he’s left the cookie behind.
But this cookie is not so easily discarded. In the scenes that follow, Ani comes alive as a true screwball comedy heroine: ferocious and fighting for what she wants. (“Impressive!” says Igor, after she punches him in the face. She is—and so are the actors: Mikey and Yura did all the physical action themselves. No stunts—and many bruises.)
The fact that Ani “doesn’t fight like a little girl,” and Garnick and Igor aren’t the brutal males that might be expected from henchmen (if this were a different sort of movie), is part of what makes the comic “home invasion” sequence fresh. No one wants to hurt her, just to keep her from running away. (They need her to be present for the annulment.) But Ani, defiantly affronted and surprisingly strong, won’t be held down. Garnick’s nose is broken, the living room gets trashed, and Igor is forced to improvise ways to restrain Ani without hurting her. He’s huge; she’s 5 foot 3, but she’s a match for him, partly because she’s so fearless, but also because Igor is so determined to keep her safe. (Something Ani can’t fathom, as the men she’s known at the club have other things than her protection on their minds.)
Sean Baker considered the 28-minute scene, which he arduously choreographed and later spent three months editing, to be essential:
“It was about getting them to that place where she was willing to go out with them to look for Ivan, whether or not they were on the same page.”
This is now a very different Ani from the customer-pleasing lap dancer we first saw at Headquarters. We’ve seen glimpses of her before, as she stands up to her boss or wrangles with Diamond, another dancer, but now she has something to really fight for, and the Brooklyn scrapper is called up. Fierce—but naively clinging to the legality of their marriage and Vanya’s affection—she’s convinced that once she gets the chance to talk to him, he’ll stand up for her and their marriage. And that hope persists, even after Toros has dragged them through all of Vanya’s Brighton Beach and Manhattan haunts and they’ve found him—in the club where he first met Anora—so inebriated that he can barely stand, much less defend Anora.
Igor carries the certain knowledge that Anora is about to be defeated by the heavy hand of money and status, and watches, silently. … Baker invites us to imagine that there’s an inner life there that is different from the role he plays on the job—something that’s true of Anora too.
Ani isn’t about to give up, though—not even when the judge in Manhattan instructs them that they will have to go to Nevada for the annulment, not even when Vanya remains unresponsive, not even in anticipation of the arrival of the parents, In fact, Ani is sure they will see how in love she and Vanya are and bless the union. Igor watches it all and knowing the family well, thinks: fat chance.
When a regal, stony Galina (Darya Ekamasova) descends from the plane, another female force of nature enters the picture. The guys don’t really have any power. Garnick is bumbling and vomiting and probably has a concussion; Toros lords it over everyone else but becomes a nervous supplicant when the parents arrive, and Vanya grabs onto his mommy’s waist and becomes the spoiled baby boy that he always had been. For him, the marriage was just a fun vacation. Igor carries the certain knowledge that Anora is about to be defeated by the heavy hand of money and status, and watches, silently. He says very little, but gradually, Baker invites us to imagine that there’s an inner life there that is different from the role he plays on the job—something that’s true of Anora too.
Touchingly (and amazingly, considering what she’s been through), Anora composes herself and deferentially approaches Galina with words about Vanya’s love for her and how delighted she is to be a part of the family. But far from warmly welcoming her, Galina coldly reminds her that she can ruin her if she wants—and Anora resigns herself to the annulment—although, good girl, she does get in a parting shot. “You are a disgusting hooker,” says Galina. Anora: “And your son hates you so much that he married one to piss you off.”
Anora took five Oscars last night: Editing, Original Screenplay, Actress, Director, Best Picture. The wins—even though I’d been rooting for Anora for weeks—were unexpectedly thrilling. Just a movie. But for me a validation of something: perhaps a restoration of faith in the possibility of intelligence and feeling winning at a time when ignorance, cruelty and brutality are so dominant. Especially after the depression and anxiety that overwhelmed me after Friday’s Oval Office meeting, it was a singular moment of pure delight.
