If Sean Baker’s 2012 Starlet is a direct aesthetic product of its time — American Apparel tube socks, porn agencies in office buildings, sex webcamming as a space where you had a fighting chance to make some money — then Anora’s aesthetics represent our postmodern relapse into the vague, overwrought nods to aesthetics of time past. Ani (Mikey Madison) is a New-Jersey-accented, gum-snapping, strip club darling. Her acrylic nails have butterflies on them, her hair is silky smooth, and her lips are glossy. “Mob wife aesthetic” (or, maybe more appropriately here, goomar aesthetic) abounds. Her friend’s dollar sign acrylics are not tacky, Ani corrects, but instead a manifestation.
When Ani meets Ivan (Mark Eidelstein), who also frequently goes by Vanya, she seems to have discovered the world’s easiest mark. Vanya is in his early twenties and bounds around like a puppy. Everything is great all the time — his life, himself, his house, and his new “girlfriend,” who he pays full price for an hour of sex, and then a week, and then ultimately marries during a trip to Las Vegas.
Ani is then swept up in Ivan’s world, including his almost caricatured oligarch Russian parents, who are livid to learn he’s married a New Jersey stripper hoping to obtain American citizenship. Much of Anora takes place with Ani being thrown into the role of a panicked wife to a husband on the lam. Her ascent from goomar to enraged mafia wife is a lightning flash; she storms the strip club she worked in just a day before in her new Russian sable (more expensive than mink!) with the rage of Karen Hill or Carmela Soprano slamming at the door of a mistresses’ paid-for apartment.
Like most of Baker’s work, Anora is often funny, with that candy-toned flavor that can feel flashy and infinitely watchable. But of all of Baker’s work regarding his longstanding fascination with sex work, Anora feels like both his most bitter and most naive representation. Ani seems to be with Vanya for the ease of the hustle, until she is suddenly single-handedly determined to be with Vanya as his wife for time eternal—stressed about him cheating on her or being unable to stay with him if his parents arrive.
Anora may argue that Ani, as a person, is a romantic at heart. But she’s first portrayed — like Jane finding ten thousand dollars in a Thermos in Starlet, or like Mikey finding a pretty teen in his hometown as a possible ticket back to porn-laden Los Angeles in Red Rocket — as someone in the industry who knows what’s up, who’s rough-and-tumble, who both doesn’t take shit and can smell it from a mile away.
Ani is hustling until she’s suddenly seemingly swept up by Vanya in all earnestness, with little signal as to why or how. Maybe I would have more patience for it if the romance felt real, but Anora opens with the sense that Ani has just hit the jackpot and fallen in love with the life she may have, not the stoned uber-rich, video-game-playing kid that is the price of admission. The difference is one of massive naivety that feels unrepresentative of Ani’s shrewdness.
