Much has already been written about Sean Baker’s 2024 movie Anora. In true stripper fashion, I’m fashionably late, and want to contribute my $20 (the average cost of a lapdance). The movie won Palme D’Or in Cannes, and cleaned up at the Oscars, winning Best Picture, Best Directing, Best Original Screenplay, Best Film Editing, and Best Actress for Mikey Madison.
Anora is a meditation on wealth and class. It’s clear that strippers are working class. They are busy selling and giving lap dances, which is physical labour. The club itself is one of the more accurate representations I’ve ever seen—the changing room is pink, with sort of crappy locker room vibes. The girls bond over their dinners that they bring in in Tupperware and there is both fierce loyalty and drama among them. Ani complains to the manager that the DJ is rude, and asserts that she will take as much time off as she pleases until the club starts treating her like an employee and contributing towards her workers’ comp and retirement. I’ve experienced all of this at my club.
Mikey Madison plays the titular Anora, a Brooklyn-based stripper of Russian origin with a potty mouth, going by the stage name Ani while working at the strip club. Madison did a lot of preparation for the role—learning Russian, stripper lingo, and also how to pole dance from working stripper, Kennady Schneider. Diamond is jealous that Ani meets Vanya, a young, attractive rich Russian who is the son of an oligarch at the club. He and Ani go on to have a whirlwind, tragicomedic romance, because his parents disapprove that he married a “whore”.
Not only is Normington a working stripper, she is one of the union organizers from the Los Angeles club Star Garden, which unionised in May 2023. As a side note for you, reader: San Francisco’s now closed Lusty Lady was the first unionised strip club in the US, and Portland’s Magic Tavern unionised in September 2023, both Star Garden and Magic Tavern are a part of the Actors’ Equity union. I’m glad strippers are finally starting to get recognised by the film industry, and as Normington said in this interview: “Sex workers make great performers, or particularly actors, [because] we have all of this life experience that can be injected into a role. I’m very excited that filmmakers are starting to recognize sex workers as an underrepresented community. Literal representation by sex workers to play sex workers is important.”
Another stripper, Luna Sofia Miranda, plays Lulu in the movie—Ani’s best friend. Miranda talks about how she landed her role, admitting she “hustled her way into” the part. She met Baker while working at the KONY HQ strip club in Brighton Beach, which was later a filming location, figured out that he’s not really there to buy lap dances, but is doing research on a film, and charmed her way into an audition.
The movie explores both Ani and Vanya’s relationship and tension with class; Ani is thrilled when Vanya buys her a giant engagement ring and she’s more than happy to retire from the club and escape her socioeconomic reality, and become a kept woman. One of my favourite parts of the movie is when Lulu tells Ani that her butterfly adorned nails are classy, compared to hers that have dollar signs painted on them.
On the other hand, Vanya, born into a wealthy family, wants to strip away from life. He doesn’t want to return to Russia and work for his father, instead wanting to marry Ani and live in America. He and Anora fly to Vegas, and have a no frills wedding at a wedding chapel, the farthest thing from a wedding that his parents would themselves organise. Vanya seems to want to sex, drugs and rock and roll his way into independence, without thinking about consequences.
It’s too bad that Vanya turns out to be spineless and runs away after his parents send goons to persuade Anora to sign annulment paperwork. They enforce class by stating that a prostitute is not good enough for her son, despite Anora’s protests that she is legitimately in love. Anora’s protestations turn physical, she too tries to run away from the goons, but they tie her up, and a slapstick comedy ensues where she tries to fight them off. I never thought that I would see a film where violence against sex workers is not immediately triggering, it seemed to me that the goons respected that she fights back and injures them.
I don’t want to spoil the film’s explosive yet ambiguous ending, but it does end with Anora and Vanya parting ways, and Anora ending up with one of the goons Vanya’s parents send for her to separate them. It may be pity, respect, genuine attraction or a combination of all three that brings them together for the film’s last scene. Or maybe, they see the hustler in each other, afterall, both of their jobs are in the grey market and heavily stigmatised.
Anora is a great film, and I was thrilled to watch it with my fellow strippers. The only part that we thought was inauthentic is how quickly Ani announced her retirement to the other strippers. We’re much more superstitious than that, we don’t want to tempt fate and then wind up back at the club because we were disappointed by a man or because a conventional job didn’t work out. We were very grateful to the Community Impact Team at TIFF, who invited us to the movie’s viewing.
Some of my regular readers will recall that I reviewed the film Zola for one of my first columns and argued that strippers are culture makers and we deserve credit for our work. I’m thrilled that this is slowly happening. A couple of weeks ago, TIFF put on a screening of Zola, and invited a couple members of the stripper advocacy group, Work Safe Twerk Safe, to give opening remarks. It’s a beautiful thing to see we’re finally getting the recognition we deserve. To echo what Normington said about the role of strippers and sex workers in the arts: “I also want to go a step further. It doesn’t have to be a sex worker role. I’m ready for everyone to see the value that we have in other artistic fields.”
While Anora was not written by a stripper like Zola was, it’s still a film very much worth watching. The strippers who participated in its creation did a great job of showing that stripping is sometimes mundane, sometimes glamorous, sometimes even dangerous. At the end of the day, stripping is a degree in life, and all its ups and downs. When Luna Sofia Miranda was asked how being a sex worker affected her life, she said: “I feel like I came of age in the strip club. I cut my teeth [there]. I learned how the world works and I’m able to see bullshit a lot more clearly. It’s easier to stand up for myself after working in the club for so long.”
More than anything, Anora is a cautionary tale—not about the dangers of sex work, rather that Pretty Woman is a fantasy. In reality it’s our own hard work support from the sex workers’ community that will help us step into our post-stripping life, not a rich man with empty promises.
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