Many of you will have seen the Richard Gere/Julia Roberts hit movie Pretty Woman. You remember the story; suave businessman meets sex worker and buys her time for a week. The Pygmalion male figure, Gere, then brings the working class sex worker into his sophisticated world. He dresses her and trains her to interact with his people. Of course, in Hollywood feel-good cinema, she educates him about some more important values, they fall in love and everything ends happily.
Anora, which won the 2024 Palme D’Or, follows the same clichéd narrative but by the end gives us something very different and more radical. This narrative about the prostitute with the heart of gold who marries the client is as old as male prejudice. Men who visit prostitutes sometimes have this fantasy that it is not commodified sex and it can be transformed into a love story. Maybe it makes them feel better, less guilty.
Watching the movie reminded me of the excellent and passionate debate we held at a 120 strong Hackney Labour general management committee where we had speakers on different sides of the debate about sex work. Younger members tended to support the liberalisation path recognising sex workers as providing a service like anyone else under our system. Older members tended to emphasise how sex work was controlled by men and reproduced women’s oppression. Anora is a great film to have as background to this debate. You could probably find arguments for both sides in the film.
Anora, the lead, played convincingly by Mikey Madison, is an erotic dancer and, depending on clients, offers more than lap dances. She meets Vanya, played by Mark Eidelstein, a much younger client than usual. Her boss knew she spoke some Russia so he put them together. He is the son of a super-rich Russian oligarch. Spoilt does not really capture just how much money he is allowed to play with. After enjoying the sexual encounter with Ani (she prefers the short version of her name) he pays her $15,000 for a week’s time with him.
Since she finds him a lot more palatable than the older slimeballs she usually services, the offer is too good to refuse. We get to see a lot of youthful, vigorous sex and on a whim, as you do if you are that rich, they go off to Las Vegas. On another whim they decide to get married. So far so Pretty Woman.
Mum and dad oligarch back in Russia are not best pleased and mobilise their factotums who are supposed to be looking after Vanya to sort the mess out and get the marriage ended as soon as possible. Here the movie passes into comic caper mode as the boss’s crew manage to lose Vanya who runs off into a drunken bender leaving them to keep hold of Ani. She fights back quite well, breaking one of the guy’s nose. There is a bit of slapstick and comedy as they search desperately for the spoilt brat before the parents arrive by private jet the next day. Ani maintains throughout this that they are married and she wants to remain Mrs Vanya.
Vanya is finally found completely plastered. Parents meet him and Ani begins to have some doubts as he starts to look very much like a Mummy’s boy again. They have to fly back to Las Vegas since New York cannot annul the marriage.
[if you want to see the movie and avoid SPOILERS stop reading now]
In Las Vegas, it is clear that Vanya is abandoning Ani despite her best efforts to convince him otherwise. We experience close up the anguish this provokes in Ani. She will be paid off with a miserly £10,000 once she is safely taken back to New York by Igor, played by Yuriy Borisov, who is the only one of the oligarch’s lackeys to show some sympathy for Ani’s fate. For instance in Las Vegas he pipes up, to the consternation of Mum oligarch, to ask that Vanya should at least apologise to Ani for what he has done to her.
In a moving final scene, that nails the whole point of the movie, Yuriy delivers Ani back to her working class home and reveals to her that he has rescued the expensive wedding ring that the family had confiscated from her. Moved by this act of kindness and perhaps wanting some emotional relief, a tearful Ani climbs on his lap for an awkward sexual act. It has all come back to this again – an activity she is well practised in and valued for by her former bosses. The film then abruptly cuts to a black screen. Normally at the end of a film there is a bit of a buzz and chatter but here we had a stunned, uncomfortable silence.
The director, Sean Baker, clearly wanted to tear up any notion that this was a romantic comedy or some sort of screwball caper. This was the anti-Pretty Woman project brilliantly pulled off. There were a few indications earlier in the movie that signalled a critique of oppressive sex work. We do not get close to the clients in any of the scenes at the escort club, the focus is on the women’s bodies. Also Ani raises the fact that she is exploited when she talks about the lack of medical insurance and how the girls are monitored and controlled:
When you give me health insurance, workers’ comp and a 401K, then you can tell me when I work
She is not a free and independent sex worker.
However the ending is even more brilliant because of the way the director lulls into a sense that this was a variation on the Pretty Woman genre. The sex scenes between the two young people (and there are a lot!) give the impression that there is a real passion, even love there. Maybe the amount of togetherness is needed to make the ending even more cutting and dramatic. It is only in the final third that we see that Vanya is backing out. In feelgood happy ending movies you would expect some sort of dramatic twist that would extricate Ani from it all.
Apart from the critique of the increasingly corporate sex industry there is a clear exposure of the way the rich and powerful want to control working class lives. In this case Anora is kidnapped and paid off. Lawyers and judges are creatures of the rich and powerful. Baker’s Florida Project is well worth catching to for its acute portrayal of the hidden poor in the USA.
Like nearly every film I see now it is rather long – 2 hours 29 minutes – but it is never boring and provides you with a lot to discuss and reflect on. Apart from winning in Cannes it is a box office success, an Oscar favourite and a critical hit.
Anora in Greek means light and understanding. Certainly light is shown on the issues around sex work ,toxic masculinity and the class system in this film that is really worth seeing.
[official trailer link https://m.imdb.com/video/vi4145202713/?ref_=tt_vi_i_2