APRIL 2025:

A Stripping Vision…

Sean Baker‘s Anora (2024) arrives as a profound entry into his growing body of work, which includes titles like Tangerine (2015), The Florida Project (2017), and Red Rocket (2021). Each film, in its own way, functions as a small miracle of compassionate storytelling: sympathetic, unflinching, and intimate portraits of marginalized individuals living on the edges of American society. With Anora, Baker takes a confident step further into international terrain while retaining his signature verité sensibilities, by crafting a romantic comedy-drama centered on Anora “Ani” Mikheeva, a Russian-American stripper who unexpectedly marries the son of a Russian oligarch.

Written, directed, produced, and edited by Baker himself, Anora once again illuminates the lives of sex workers with a depth and dignity rarely afforded them in mainstream cinema. The film stars Mikey Madison in a breakout performance as the titular Ani, whose journey is as comedic as it is heartbreaking, as dreamlike as it is real. With a supporting cast including Mark Eydelshteyn, Yura Borisov, Karren Karagulian, Vache Tovmasyan, Darya Ekamasova, and Aleksei Serebryakov, Anora forms a vibrant cultural tapestry that is as much about New York’s immigrant communities as it is about class, desire, and freedom.

Baker’s stated mission, as he told the press for the 77th Cannes Film Festival and reported by Variety, is clear: “Telling human stories, by telling stories that are hopefully universal […] It’s helping remove the stigma that’s been applied to [sex work], that’s always been applied to this livelihood.”⁴ 

Anora is perhaps his most direct attempt yet at achieving this goal. The film’s emotional heft and thematic maturity reflect a deepening of Baker’s own philosophy: empathy is not a narrative device, but a moral stance.

This critique aims to explore Anora in exhaustive detail, examining how it supports Baker’s vision through its representation of sex work, character development, narrative structure, cinematography, and thematic complexity. Drawing on quotes from Baker and background on the film’s inspirations—including his early career editing Russian-American wedding videos and a real-life anecdote about a kidnapped bride—as well as the creative input of consultant Andrea Werhun (author of Modern Whore), this analysis seeks to affirm Anora as a landmark film in the representation of sex workers on screen.

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Plot Overview and Character Analysis

At first glance, Anora may resemble a modern-day Cinderella story—an American stripper swept into a fairytale marriage with a Russian heir—but Baker quickly subverts the genre’s tropes to deliver a far more textured and morally complex narrative. The film follows Anora “Ani” Mikheeva (Madison), a Russian-American woman living in Brooklyn and working as a stripper to support herself. The early scenes are intimate and immersive, placing the audience squarely in Ani’s daily world, one defined not just by financial hustle but by small moments of humor, camaraderie, and vulnerability.

Ani’s chance meeting with Vanya (Eydelshteyn), the idealistic and slightly naive son of a Russian oligarch, sparks the central romance of the film. Their whirlwind courtship—steeped in mutual curiosity, shared alienation, and youthful defiance—culminates in a spontaneous wedding. But Baker refuses to let the story slide into romantic fantasy. When Vanya’s powerful parents (played with chilling calculation by Serebryakov and Ekamasova) descend on New York to forcibly separate the couple, the tone darkens, pivoting from dreamy urban fairy tale to fraught hostage thriller.

The kidnapping element, inspired by a story Baker heard from a friend, introduces the themes of control, ownership, and cultural clash. Ani is no passive damsel; her resilience and resourcefulness come to the forefront as she navigates a series of moral and emotional landmines. Rather than casting Ani as a victim, Baker and Madison portray her as a fully realized person: emotionally layered, flawed, funny, cunning, and brave. She is not defined by her profession, but neither is her work as a stripper ignored or trivialized. Her choices are not sanitized but contextualized—rooted in survival, autonomy, and emotional complexity.

Supporting characters like Ani’s coworkers and boss lend richness and texture to the world she inhabits. Karren Karagulian and Vache Tovmasyan offer subtle but emotionally grounded performances that underscore the tight-knit nature of immigrant communities in New York. Meanwhile, Yura Borisov’s turn as one of Vanya’s conflicted cousins adds a layer of tension and nuance to the family dynamic.

The film’s second half reveals layers to Vanya as well. His initial naivety gives way to a deeper understanding of both his own privilege and Ani’s humanity. Yet Baker resists turning him into a white knight or savior figure. Vanya is a catalyst, not a redeemer. The real story belongs to Ani, and Madison’s performance is nothing short of revelatory—channeling her character’s grit, charm, pain, and hope with breathtaking emotional clarity.

Baker’s humanistic approach is evident in every scene, and nowhere more so than in his treatment of Ani. In one particularly memorable sequence, Ani shares a private moment of self-reflection while watching an old home video—perhaps a nod to Baker’s own past editing Russian-American wedding tapes. It’s a quiet, haunting scene, charged with longing and alienation, that re-centers the film on the interior life of its protagonist.

Through these nuanced characters and their evolving relationships, Anora explores themes of power, love, commodification, and freedom. Each character reflects and refracts these themes in different ways, but at the center stands Ani, a figure of striking emotional depth who anchors the narrative and gives Baker’s vision its fullest expression.

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Directorial Vision and Artistic Influences

Sean Baker has long been fascinated with telling stories that dwell in the margins of mainstream culture. His unique artistic voice marries documentary realism with narrative inventiveness, and Anora reflects both the maturation of his style and the broadening of his cultural lens. From a technical standpoint, Baker’s direction in Anora is sharp and agile, his editing crisp, and his mise-en-scène deeply rooted in the locations he captures. But what truly elevates the film is its personal foundation—an intermingling of real-life inspiration, social commitment, and artistic collaboration.

In an interview with Filmmaker Magazine⁵, Baker revealed that part of the inspiration for Anora came from his time editing Russian-American wedding videos in the early 2000s. These videos, as he described, were often ornate, culturally rich affairs—celebratory but also transactional in nature. He was struck by how these weddings, often filmed in New York banquet halls, became stages for navigating identity, status, and familial expectations. That visual and emotional memory bleeds into Anora in subtle but persistent ways. The film’s aesthetic, particularly during the wedding and post-wedding sequences, channels that same chaotic, emotionally heightened atmosphere—flashes of garish glamour layered over quiet desperation.

Additionally, Baker has mentioned that a friend’s anecdote about a Russian-American newlywed kidnapped for collateral served as the plot’s foundation. This bizarre and harrowing true story, almost mythological in its implications, gave Baker a narrative hook with high stakes. Yet what distinguishes Anora is that Baker doesn’t sensationalize this premise. Instead, he filters it through the deeply subjective experience of Ani, making the ordeal less about criminal theatrics and more about psychological survival, gendered power, and cultural misunderstanding.

Another key component of Baker’s creative process on Anora was his collaboration with Andrea Werhun, the Canadian writer and actress behind the 2018 memoir Modern Whore. As a former sex worker, Werhun brought authenticity, sensitivity, and a lived-in understanding of the profession to her role as a creative consultant. Baker’s told IndieWire ⁶ that his decision to include her was not merely a gesture toward credibility—it was a deliberate act of co-authorship. Through Werhun’s insights, Ani’s character was shaped with nuance and care, ensuring that her portrayal would avoid the traps of caricature or victimhood.

Werhun’s influence is felt most keenly in how Ani navigates her professional life. Scenes of her at work are neither romanticized nor degraded. The film instead presents sex work as work: a job that demands performance, negotiation, resilience, and vulnerability. This honesty dovetails perfectly with Baker’s larger goal of helping “remove the stigma that’s been applied to [sex work], that’s always been applied to this livelihood.”⁷ With Werhun’s guidance, Baker creates space for Ani’s profession to exist as part of her identity—not her defining trait, but a legitimate aspect of her economic and emotional reality.

Cinematically, Baker continues his tradition of using real locations and casting a mix of professional and non-professional actors. His camera lingers not just on people but on neighborhoods, textures, and sounds. New York in Anora is a place of contradictions: glittering skylines against cramped apartments, immigrant hustle under looming wealth, joy pressed against violence. The authenticity of these backdrops reinforces the story’s emotional realism, allowing the viewer to feel less like a spectator and more like a participant.

Baker’s use of handheld cinematography (Drew Daniels) and natural light further amplifies this immersion. Every element of Anora—from its frenetic pacing to its moments of stark stillness—reflects the director’s belief in narrative empathy. For Baker, form is function. His direction aims not just to entertain, but to elevate—to recognize dignity in those whom society often ignores.

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Depiction of Sex Work in Anora

In Anora, Baker presents a radically humane and refreshingly non-sensationalized portrayal of sex work. The film not only resists the exploitative tropes that have historically dominated cinematic depictions of sex workers, but it also foregrounds the profession as a legitimate and multifaceted labor practice. Through the lens of Ani’s character, the audience is invited into a world where sex work is not merely backdrop or metaphor—it is real work, shaped by economic necessity, emotional labor, and personal agency.

Unlike many films that cast sex workers as either tragic martyrs or objects of moral judgment, Anora refuses to flatten Ani into a symbol. Her job is a part of her life, but it does not consume her identity. She is not waiting to be rescued; she is trying to survive. She is sharp, emotionally intelligent, and aware of the risks and contradictions that come with her profession. The club where she works is depicted as a place of community as much as performance. Fellow workers are not reduced to background props or sources of pity—they are friends, advisors, and witnesses to each other’s lives.

One of Baker’s masterstrokes is in normalizing Ani’s labor without downplaying its complexity. He shows the preparation, the mental calculus, and the blurred boundaries that come with sex work, but he also shows its humor, its small victories, and the camaraderie it fosters. In doing so, he deconstructs the rigid binary of empowerment versus exploitation that so often dominates discourse around the profession.

The inclusion of Andrea Werhun as a consultant undoubtedly shaped these scenes. Her perspective as a former sex worker and author of Modern Whore informs the film’s refusal to lapse into stereotype. Werhun’s influence is especially visible in the small but powerful details: Ani’s methods for negotiating with clients, her work-life boundaries, her mixed feelings about her job, and her matter-of-fact approach to her own body and sexuality.

Baker’s approach aligns with a broader shift in contemporary cinema toward representing sex workers with more complexity and care. Films like Tangerine, Support the Girls, and Hustlers have begun to challenge traditional portrayals, but Anora goes further by refusing to frame Ani’s work as a problem to be solved. Instead, it becomes part of her subjectivity—one that shapes, but does not define, her.

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Comparative Analysis with Other Films Depicting Sex Work

Anora enters a landscape of cinematic portrayals of sex work that spans decades of evolving perspectives, from the exploitation and victimization tropes of early cinema to the more nuanced, contemporary takes seen in films like Tangerine, Support the Girls, and Hustlers. However, Sean Baker’s portrayal in Anora stands apart not just because of its humanism, but due to its refusal to make sex work the central problem to be solved, which is a pattern often found in many mainstream portrayals.

Breaking Away from the Stereotype of the Victim

Historically, sex workers in cinema have frequently been depicted as either victims of circumstance or fallen women needing to be saved. Classic examples of this trope include films such as Pretty Woman (1990), directed by Garry Marshall, where the lead character, a prostitute named Vivian Ward (Julia Roberts), is given an escape route from her troubled lifestyle through romantic intervention with Edward Lewis (Richard Gere). While Pretty Woman may be a beloved romantic comedy, it underscores a tendency to view sex work primarily as a plight that needs to be alleviated by outside forces. In contrast, Anora eschews the notion that Ani’s life must be rescued or changed in any drastic way, instead focusing on her agency within the world she inhabits.

What’s distinctive about Anora in this regard is that while Ani certainly faces challenges and violence—particularly as her new husband’s family interferes in their marriage—her choices as a sex worker are not framed as mistakes or indications of a desperate life. Baker’s narrative keeps a steady focus on Ani’s resilience, humor, and emotional intelligence, allowing the film to communicate the complexities of her decisions. The stripping profession is not minimized, but neither is it romanticized. The reality of sex work, as depicted through Ani, is far from the oversimplified “victim narrative.”

Shifting the Conversation Around Empowerment

Films like Hustlers (2019), directed by Lorene Scafaria, also take a more empowered approach to the sex work narrative, albeit with a focus on financial independence and camaraderie among women. In Hustlers, the protagonists—strippers and ex-strippers—work together to turn the tables on wealthy, exploitative men by stealing from them. While it is an undeniably entertaining and empowering story of sisterhood, Hustlers still leans into elements of criminality and deception as defining aspects of the plot. The film creates a somewhat glamorized, but still morally dubious, portrait of women using their sex appeal as a form of power.

Anora, by contrast, remains grounded in the reality of its protagonist’s choices. While Ani’s profession may indeed offer a form of financial power, the film does not glorify her ability to outwit or manipulate. Instead, it emphasizes her emotional complexity: her internal struggles and her relationships with others. The power that Ani holds is rooted not in deception or revenge, but in her ability to navigate the world on her own terms despite systemic barriers. This distinction further underscores Baker’s philosophy that sex work, like any other form of labor, involves nuanced decisions driven by the need for personal agency and economic survival.

Avoiding the “Saving” Narrative

What Anora and films like Support the Girls (2018) do differently is emphasize the community and solidarity that can be found within the sex work industry, without reducing it to a story of moral redemption. In Support the Girls, the central character, played by Regina Hall, is a manager of a sports bar with a Hooters-like atmosphere. The film showcases her emotional labor as a manager, the relationships between the women she oversees, and their shared experiences of navigating a high-risk and often demeaning environment.

Like Support the Girls, Anora focuses on the camaraderie between sex workers, notably in scenes where Ani bonds with her colleagues. While Support the Girls is less directly about sex work itself than about the complicated lives of its characters, Anora offers a more integrated depiction, where Ani’s work is an essential part of her character’s life and personality, rather than a backdrop for her redemption arc. The film resists any impulse to portray the profession as inherently degrading, instead allowing Ani’s actions to drive the story and convey a sense of autonomy, agency, and empowerment in the face of economic coercion.

Comparing to Tangerine and the Representation of Marginalized Individuals

The similarities between Anora and Tangerine are clear, particularly in the shared emphasis on marginalization and survival. Both films offer nuanced depictions of communities often overlooked in mainstream narratives. Tangerine, which follows two transgender sex workers in Los Angeles, uses a mix of humor and raw emotion to tell a story about resilience and friendship. Baker’s decision to present sex work without judgment mirrors Tangerine’s refusal to sensationalize or victim-blame its characters.

What Anora shares with Tangerine is the balance between depicting hardship and celebrating joy. The worlds of both films are full of gritty realism—yet, at their cores, they reflect stories of human connection. This nuanced portrayal of sex work—filled with humor, sorrow, and complexity—sets both Anora and Tangerine apart from films that approach sex work with an eye towards moral conclusion or stereotypical tropes. Neither film suggests that the characters need saving or redemption; instead, they advocate for recognition and understanding, an acknowledgment of the lived realities of their protagonists.

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Sex Work as Emotional Labor

One of the most profound aspects of Anora is how it humanizes sex work by exploring it as emotional labor. Baker, through Ani’s interactions and her work environment, highlights the psychological toll that accompanies the profession. Unlike films that depict sex workers purely in physical or transactional terms, Anora underscores the emotional complexities that define Ani’s experiences: the need to stay “on,” the emotional resilience required to navigate customer expectations, and the isolation that comes with performing intimacy without emotional connection.

Baker also portrays how Ani’s work informs her sense of self. It is not merely a profession to her; it is intertwined with her emotional and physical landscape. Her relationships with men are portrayed as transactional, yes, but they are also deeply personal, marked by a sense of familiarity and sometimes warmth. These moments of human connection are key to the film’s distinction, as they allow the viewer to empathize with Ani as a full, multifaceted person rather than reducing her to a trope of victimhood or empowerment.

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A Radical Film in the Context of Modern Cinema

Anora represents a significant contribution to the ongoing conversation around the portrayal of sex work in cinema. It challenges the audience to reconsider entrenched stereotypes and invites us to engage with the realities of sex work without moral judgment. Baker’s vision for Anora is clear: by telling a human story with depth and authenticity, he seeks to de-stigmatize a profession that has long been misunderstood and marginalized. Through his collaboration with Andrea Werhun and his sensitive direction, Anora presents sex work as a valid profession and as an experience that involves choice, agency, and human complexity. In this way, Anora transcends the traditional narrative of victimization, embracing a more complex, humanizing approach to storytelling that is characteristic of Baker’s broader cinematic vision.

In the end, Anora succeeds in fulfilling Sean Baker’s mission to “remove the stigma” surrounding sex work by portraying it not as a moral or ethical issue, but as part of the diverse, lived realities of its characters. Through Ani’s eyes, the film offers a glimpse into a world of survival, joy, pain, and connection—compelling us to reconsider our perceptions of sex work and those who perform it. Anora is not just a film about a stripper or a bride; it’s a film about being human, and that is where its true power lies.

Anora is available now with a subscription to Hulu…