Top 15 Movies of 2024: No. 3 - Anora

3. Anora, dir. Sean Baker

Sean Baker loves whores. Sex work, be it stripping, pornography, or straight-up prostitution (and the blurry lines between these jobs), has been a feature of his last five movies. The awkward thing is that Baker is a straight guy, seemingly happily married, obsessed with young women in the sex trades. He's found quite a few young stars such as Suzanna Son in Red Rocket, or Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor, the two trans star of Tangerine. Red Rocket, notably. was all about a despicable loser, a "suitcase pimp", grooming a young woman to be his next meal ticket. Sean Baker is not just directing these movies, he's also the writer, producer, editor, and sometimes cinematographer. These are his movies, through and through, auteur theory all the way, and this is a guy who loves the trashiest elements of society. His characters are not rich, they make bad choices with what few options they have, they are not well-educated, and what they do is, for sure fetishisized, but not glamorous. We're right on the border of exploitation. The director says the right things, he supports sex work as a profession, he is an LGBTQ "ally", as toothless as that term is in 2025. But can we honestly say that Baker is not titillated by this stuff?

If suddenly some dark accusation comes about Sean Baker from one of young women he's worked with, I will not be terribly surprised.

Now I write this as somebody who equally loves trash. Yesterday I was gushing about The Substance largely for being a glossy 21st century take on Brian Yuzna movies. What Sean Baker does is perhaps more difficult since he so heavily steeps himself in "reality". The Florida Project is fictional, but it does show a real situation of people living on welfare in motels and how the system sets them up to fail. Anora is Baker at his least grounded, but it still needs physical reality. We're still focused on details like the protagonist not buying milk for their roommate. 

There are parts of Anora that are made out of random guys the film crew ran into while shooting in Brooklyn or Vegas. Total civilians on the street end up joining in the celebration for the wedding. You have Mikey Madison as the titular character, a Brooklynite stripper, who in the opening montage is dancing and entertaining random men, some of whom might have been actual patrons to this gentleman's club. It is a bit weird to have your star play a stripper but also, thanks to how you shoot your movie, you're making her be one in real life, you know? There's a Coney Island candy shop that the production smashed, with its real owner (Billy O'Brien) in frame. He has the kind of weathered eighty-four-year-old face that would never be in a movie except for neorealism verisimilitude. Baker depicts the strip club with all his loud, charged, headache-inducing thrills as a patron would see it: a sex fantasy. But also it is a service job, basically having to baby sit lonely strangers, while you argue with your boss about benefits. We are having our cake and eating it too, here, and I'm not going to be the bad guy and say that's not allowed.

What's interesting is that Baker's filmography is only getting funnier. The Florida Project is miserable. Meanwhile, Red Rocket is practically screwball in comparison. Anora's central premise could be - and often is - a melodrama about broken dreams. The central character, her name Anglicized to "Ani", gets a magical opportunity when a young immature oligarch's son, Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), basically buys her out as his girlfriend, then wife. She only got chosen because she can speak a bit of broken Russian in a thick Brooklyn accent. The consequences are coming, Ani has supplied fantasies for so long she's actually come to believe one. However, ultimately she is just another toy that a spoiled brat will not take responsibility for. In the mean time, before the harsh reality sets in, half of Anora is a weird single night comedy. Ani finds herself helping Vanya's handlers, a group of incompetent thugs to wander Coney Island and Brighton Beach for hours, looking for Vanya, who has run off instead of facing up to any of this.

In this section of the movie, the thugs triple park their car which nearly gets impounded. One of them has a concussion and pukes all over the dash. They're running around trying to threaten random people in a diner who have no idea what is going on and are in no way frightened. This night seems to never end, just an increasingly absurd sight of three goons and a young woman going practically door to door, asking anybody "have you seen this deadbeat bridegroom?"

I often talk about how the thing that separates a good movie or story from a truly great one is the ending. I should be left with a difficult question. The final scene of Anora is one of those tough, confusing things. I don't fully know what you should take away here. Ani has lived up to the objectified fantasy of herself, pretending to be a wife but really serving as a prostitute for a boy whose only interests are partying and having no idea how to hold an Xbox controller. Vanya's got all the love-making skills of a leg-humping bulldog until Ani dares ask him to slow down so she can at least get something out of this. What I'm saying is: even the Cinderella dream is all transactional. There's one thug Igor (Yura Borisov) who dares show her anything like kindness or respect for her feelings, even recognizes her as "Anora", not "Ani". Their final moment is nearly a romance, or perhaps one last transaction she feels she owes him. And when whatever is happening here veers towards tenderness, when a very uncomfortable Igor tries to kiss her, it just breaks down into sobbing. The moment this is not a quid pro quo, not exploitation but rather an equal human connection, she cannot handle it.

That is not really the kind of movie Sean Baker makes, after all.