The Decision to Make Anora a Delusional Romantic Undermines the Film’s Anti-Fairytale Approach and Its Social Commentary
🕒 6 min read | Preface/ TL;DR: Completely ignoring her new husband’s brazen abandonment, Anora spent the majority of the remaining film wearing rose-colored glasses—the same kind that once led a rag-wearing, forced-laborer like Cinderella to reimagine the attic rats crawling around her as stylish, matchmaking mice determined to set her up with a prince by midnight. But a character with Anora’s disposition and circumstances would’ve recalibrated instantly, removing those glasses and recognizing her version of magical mice for what they were: f****** rats. Her goal would have shifted from securing a happy ending with Vanya to negotiating a lucrative annulment agreement with his mother. While blind romantic optimism from fictional characters is hardly rare, the technical and narrative resolution in this film (as well as the filmmaker’s documented sensitivity toward the world it explores) seems intent on challenging such idealism. For that reason, this mischaracterization felt less like a genuine choice and more like an attempt to manufacture compatibility between a mainstream, idealist audience and a low-income sex worker protagonist. Ironically, that choice undercuts the film’s own aims to humanize sex workers and portray the serial disappointments of navigating the class system from the bottom up. That said, it’s a beautiful and entertaining film. Go see it.
Anora, a romantic dramedy by Sean Baker, stars Mikey Madison as a struggling Russian-American stripper who moonlights as a call girl in South Brooklyn. While on the job, Anora meets Vanya Zakharov, the spoiled son of wealthy Russian elitists who want him to return to Russia and take his future seriously. In an attempt to stall leaving America, the careless young man rebels by proposing to Anora after a week of paying her to be his live-in girlfriend. She accepts, and they get married in Vegas. When Vanya's parents discover the marriage, they send three family employees (Toro, Garnik, and Igor) to ensure its immediate reversal. Once the men arrive at the family's Brooklyn home, Vanya flees, leaving Anora behind. The three men, each of whom comically means her no harm, have to hold a stubborn, feisty and love-stricken Anora hostage during their sprawling search for Vanya all over Brighton Beach.
When they find Vanya, the group boards a private jet to Vegas with his ruthless mother and checked-out father for the annulment. As expected, Vanya ignores Anora's frantic pleas for him to maintain their marriage, refusing even to make eye contact with her as the paperwork is completed. Igor, who has treated Anora respectfully despite her verbal abuse of him, is tasked with escorting her back to the Zakharov home to clear out her belongings. This leads to a tender moment between the two as he’s dropping her and her bags off at her home. During sex, Anora suddenly becomes distressed to the point of pummeling Igor as she processes her bleak, frustrating reality of a fellow working-class suitor who likely won't be getting her out of the strip club any time soon.
Each performance is distinctly remarkable. The characters feel lived-in, and the cast's interactions are realistic, with immaculate comedic timing; a testament to Baker's naturalistic dialogue.
The technical craft in Anora is undeniably masterful. The use of retro Soviet LOMO lenses, with their vintage greenish tint yet contemporary softness, produces visuals that complement the timelessness of the film's allegorical premise. The sporadic use of striking red accents against a restrained palette of gray, black, and white creates visual echoes between scenes that seamlessly bind disparate tonal shifts throughout the movie. Baker's documentary-influenced editing approach, which moves linearly without disjointed transitional shots, makes the viewer feel like they're along for the ride, thus emphasizing the importance of perspective in the film's narrative. Raw environmental sound often replaces traditional score, reinforcing the organic nature of the performances and dialogue. These sharp choices are all strategically designed to draw the viewer into a dreamlike cinematic experience; the lenses signal oneiric time disorientation, the scattered pop-of-color scheme evokes the idea of elusive, spotty images that linger from dreams upon waking, and the pairing of perspective-focused editing techniques with the organic soundscape suggests that this dream is a lucid one.
This thorough and engaging execution enables the audience to vicariously, cozily slip into the vantage of the heroine, sharing her head-in-the-clouds viewpoint. But this is precisely the issue that causes my eyes to roll to the back of my head every time someone wants to discuss this otherwise perfect movie.
The film's cinematographic treatment of Anora's story as a figurative dream, along with her explicit dialogue reference to Cinderella's fairytale ending—only to invert it with a relentlessly painful conclusion—makes clear to the audience the distinction between dreams and fairy tales. Unlike fairy tales, which unfold outside reality, dreams occur within it, meaning their temporary reprieve must inevitably give way to the harsh realities of the real world. If reality is intentionally being upheld and underscored in this film, then the deliberate choice to characterize an experienced working-class sex worker as financially deprioritized, romantically naive, and situationally oblivious becomes a distracting incongruity. The character's head-in-the-clouds persona ultimately feels more like mental fogginess, causing her implausibly delayed awakening from the dream and a slightly weakened impact of the movie's dramatic ending.
While Anora's character is concerned with money (as evidenced by her boasting to the other strippers about her new husband's wealth when she quit her job after the Vegas trip), she was written to prioritize the prospect of Vanya's love over his potential ability to free her from her socioeconomic predicament. When Vanya abandons Anora at the beginning of the second act, the perspective-focused direction and editing approaches abruptly shift into a view that is more reminiscent of a stage play. Distant actor blocking framed in a wide shot of the film's most extended scene yet reflects a new, much colder barrier between the audience and the action. It's at this point that the audience has been jolted from its shared dreamlike viewing and brought into a state of realism. But Anora won't wake up; the audience now observes her blatantly misguided delusion that Vanya—a textbook asinine man-baby who’s just left her standing half-naked in the middle of his living room, surrounded by three strange men—will come back and convince everyone he's genuinely in love with her and plans to stay married. Because she's so convinced of this, she repeatedly declines substantial financial annulment bribes from his family. At one point during the chaos, a sympathetic but wiser Toro offers her retroactive advice to always ask for more money than the initial offer in arrangements like this from people like Vanya. Anora completely fails to heed the advice in a later, intentionally paralleled scene where Vanya's mom makes a final financial offer, resulting in Anora exiting the marriage with nothing to show for it but disillusioned heartbreak.
A history of transactional experiences with men and a hardened disposition should set a character like Anora up with a level of anticipation that would make it nearly impossible for such disappointment to sneak up on her. Even if Anora's character wasn’t the brightest, was initially caught off guard by her first encounter with wealth, or was genuinely infatuated with a client, she would at least be familiar enough with situational patterns involving elitism, misbehaving men, empty promises, exploitation, and post-letdown re-routing to navigate her situation with less vulnerability. She may even be dreading, for instance, the condescending smirks of Vanya's mother rather than callowly greeting her as a new family member and shamelessly wheeling out her broken Russian upon meeting. I'd even imagine a constant knot in her stomach over the probability that Vanya wouldn't stick around up until the very moment he left. At which point, she would begin to accept the family's offers of temporary economic relief, considering the possibility of full economic freedom had slipped away once his view of her as a defective utilitarian purchase became transparently clear. And plot-wise, her desperate need to find Vanya would still be valid, but witnessing a primal shift in her motive to do so would make for a more compelling character arc.
When Anora finally has her breakthrough in the film's final scene with Igor, it remains a tearjerking performance, but what would've made me snot-sob would be if, despite being a sharp-witted character with the capacity to recognize and play the game she was being used as a pawn in (but who unfortunately ended up losing yet again due to the perpetual constraints of classism), her story still ended in the same pit of hopelessness. This would've driven her anguished feelings of exasperation toward life and misplaced resentment toward Igor even deeper.
Some might read Anora’s behavior as psychological denial, but this ignores that her enamored delusions begin before her trauma of being jilted. Vanya enchanted her during their first profitable week, when pragmatic calculation would be most prudent.
As captivating as it is, Anora's dreamy POV cinematography is clearly calibrated for an unburdened, middle-class-plus audience whose lives bear little resemblance to its heroine’s. The purpose of Anora's romantic point of view is to allow these particular voyeurs the chance to, in turn, romanticize her situation. This continues a long cinematic tradition of sex worker protagonists, from Dumas' Marguerite Gautier to Pretty Woman's Vivian Ward, who are depicted as unrealistically innocent or love-focused. A hint of fierceness is allowed but if these protagonists were shown as calculating or overly desperate in addition to their original sin of being sexually impure, mainstream audiences would traditionally struggle to connect with them. It’s this narrative logic that explains why Igor, rather than Anora, must steal Anora’s engagement ring from the family on their way out of the annulment signing and later surprise her with it: her heartbreak must outweigh all financial concern. In fact, this detail mirrors Vivian Ward's (who is, ironically, the Cinderella of sex workers) tearful refusal to accept Edward's money when he callously overlooks that she's developed feelings for him toward the end of their own paid live-in girlfriend agreement week. Both characters are denied the moral latitude to claim what they have earned without judgment. This is the derivative cinematic trope of the ‘fallen woman’ or the 'hooker with a heart of gold' at play.
It's hard to reconcile that Sean Baker—known for bringing authenticity, insight and respect to his sex worker characters in films like Tangerine, The Florida Project, and Red Rocket, and for sharing his Oscar for Anora with the sex worker community while calling attention to their lack of protection based on sex work’s unfair, antiquated treatment as shameful and undignified—is himself a romanticizer. Unlike those earlier, smaller-audience films, Anora targets mainstream viewers, which may explain its reliance on familiar tropes. Yet if that is the intent, it undercuts the underlying intended critique of society by sanitizing the gritty reality that, guided by survival instincts, real poverty and income-driven sex work often yield complex and unpalatable behavior from those subjected to it. Equipping these characters with unnaturally agreeable qualities only reinforces the idea that people in desperate circumstances are intrinsically in need of moral redemption, rather than confronting that notion by focusing on the structural inequalities that facilitate their need to operate within survival mode.
A more gripping fairy tale subversion would come not from Anora failing to achieve a Cinderella ending, but from rejecting the 'heart-of-gold' trope along the way, thus affirming her right to act out of necessity.
While not every piece of entertainment needs to serve a greater message and not every character needs to provide a realistic portrayal of the demographic it references, Anora's technical world-building and narrative storytelling all point to serious artistic and social intentions rather than mere commercial entertainment, resulting in this one lingering setback. However, despite the sole character development issue, Anora succeeds as a visually stunning and entertaining watch, offering a harmonious tonal blend that will satisfy most viewers looking for quality independent cinema. While it may not achieve the raw authenticity of Baker's previous work, it triumphs as his most sophisticated film and is definitely worth seeing. And snot-sobbing over.
Anyae Katz, 2024