The Ethical Dignity of Anora

Still from Sean Baker, Anora (2024).

Talking to her best friend in the strip joint where she used to work, Ani recounts her whirlwind tryst and Vegas marriage to a Russian oligarch’s son. Then she says that for her honeymoon she’d like to go to Disney World, her childhood dream destination. This is a nod to Pretty Woman, or rather to J. F. Lawton’s original script for the film, titled $3,000, which ends with the superrich Edward brutally throwing his prostitute companion Vivian out of his car, followed by a bitterly ironic scene where Vivian and her best friend make a trip to Disneyland. As in Pretty Woman, in Anora the escort is engaged for a week of sex work, and there is a rags-to-riches Cinderella fantasy of being saved by a “prince charming” and suddenly jumping up social classes. But Anora is closer to the original dark vision of Pretty Woman, before it was bought by Disney and the ending changed and the reference to Disney erased.1

The film, directed by Sean Baker, tells the story of Anora “Ani” Mikheeva, a stripper at a New York club who gets sent one night to a certain client, Vanya, thanks to her knowledge of Russian. Ivan “Vanya” Zakharov is an oligarch’s son, partying and hanging out in America. In a deservedly lauded performance, Mikey Madison’s Ani is a street-savvy, dazzling burst of kinetic energy. Baker has proven to be a kind of poet of sex workers, and a number of Ani’s coworkers are played by strippers (including Luna Sofía Miranda, Lindsey Normington, and Sophia Carnabuci). Ani and Vanya hit it off and he ends up buying her company for a whole week (at a cost of fifteen thousand dollars, instead of Pretty Woman’s three thousand). They fly to Las Vegas with friends, go wild, and get married. For Vanya, it’s a way to avoid having to return to Russia, but he also professes his love for Ani, saying they would have fun together even if he had no money. In the second act, the hammer drops: the family will in no way tolerate this “fraud marriage,” men are sent to deal with the situation. Vanya, completely unheroically, flees on his own, leaving the newly wed Ani to deal with his father’s three goons alone. She’s tied up, fights back, seriously injures one of the guys, is gagged. In what will turn out to be an important detail, her four-carat diamond wedding ring is snatched off her finger. Eventually, she’s released and persuaded into helping the goons recover her runaway spouse. What follows is a screwball adventure through Coney Island, as they all go in search of Vanya, from clubs to diners to arcades to a candy shop, eventually finding him in the same strip club where he first met Ani, but now with another girl, Diamond, giving him a lap dance. Vanya is forcibly retrieved, the mother and father arrive by private jet, and they all fly back to Vegas to get the marriage annulled. In the final part of the film, one of the henchmen, Igor, is left to mind Ani for the night and pay her off the next morning—and then comes a heartrending twist at the very end.

Vanya turns out to be a scoundrel, or even lower than a scoundrel because he’s not even bad or evil, simply lacking in morality. The Armenian family fixer Toros (played by Baker regular Karren Karagulian) is right when, confronting Ani in the oligarch parents’ mansion, he tells her, “You don’t know him”—Ivan is not your friend. (Toros’s dedication to the Zakharovs is underscored in a hilarious scene in which he runs out in the middle of the baptism of his godson to chase after their delinquent son.) Vanya lives in the moment; he is completely sincere and completely insincere since for him there is nothing beyond the present moment, except the next one. This is the source of his charm. He rebels, but he doesn’t rebel; he only lives for having a good time. America is an escape for him, a way to flee his family and family obligations: his controlling mother (played to a bitchy tee by Darya Ekamasova) and his father’s demand that he join the family business (played by Aleksey Serebryakov, who was also the Russian oligarch in the John Wick clone Nobody). He goes clubbing and hangs out with a bunch of locals, including a couple who work at a delightfully old-school candy shop. Through Vanya, the film cuttingly depicts the libidinal ideal of a certain loser masculinity: neither drink and drugs nor ecstatic partying nor even rapid-fire sex—of course he engages in all of these—but playing video games at home with a half-naked girl draped around you, motionless so as not to interfere with the controller and silent. This is the depressing ideal of contemporary hedonism, what the (castrated) sons who can have anything without limits really desire: a mannequin and a console.

Anora is evidently connected with Pretty Woman, but there is another film that ought to be mentioned here: Interdevochka, a Soviet blockbuster and the first film in the USSR about prostitution. It came out in 1989, some months before Pretty Woman in 1990, and the two films are linked together as if by a secret thread. Both tell the stories of prostitutes, Tanya and Vivian, looking for better lives, and both women find their rich, or at least relatively rich, saviors: for the one, Edvard Larsen, a Swedish mid-level computer executive who travels for work from Stockholm to Leningrad; and for the other, Edward Lewis, a wealthy corporate raider and playboy in LA on business. It is a tale of two Edwards, a story of love and capitalism, told from opposing ends of the geopolitical spectrum in the waning days of the Cold War.

Interdevochka was a Soviet-Swedish coproduction, directed by Pyotr Todorovsky and based on the popular novel by Vladimir Kunin that was published in 1987 and translated into English as Intergirl: A Hard Currency Prostitute. (Like Pretty Woman, which launched Julia Roberts to worldwide fame, Interdevochka also launched Elena Yakovleva’s career.) “Hard currency prostitutes” were those who only slept with foreigners and were paid in foreign money. Prostitution was not illegal in the USSR because officially it did not exist; exchanging foreign money, however, was strictly forbidden. The “intergirls” are the dolled up shock-troops of the coming Russian capitalism, replacing the heroic factory workers of old: they are experts in Western luxury goods, traffickers of Western currency (valuta), and, most importantly from the perspective of the state, they grease the wheels for much-needed foreign business deals. The problem of 1990s Russia will be that of capitalist pedagogy—how to teach a previously socialist people to desire money and strive for individual success. Yet the film, while announcing this epochal turn, also moralistically condemns it. Interdevochka follows Tanya as she marries Edvard (one of her clients) and moves away from Leningrad to the Stockholm suburbs. At first she is overjoyed with her new life, shopping in a well-stocked supermarket and luxuriating in a fur coat and a sporty white Volkswagen bought for her by Edvard—just like in Pretty Woman, shopping is the real libidinal focus of the film. But soon discontentment sets in. Despite being furnished with all manner of consumer goods, Tanya is terribly homesick and alienated in this Western environment, and she longs to see her mother. But she cannot go home: she is warned by a friend that a former associate has denounced her to the police for currency trading in order to get out of her own legal troubles. and that she will be arrested as soon as she sets foot in the country. Yet Tanya senses that something is horribly wrong; in fact, her mother has committed suicide after having been told by the police that her daughter is a prostitute. The last scene of the film shows Tanya racing to the airport at night, driving recklessly in the pouring rain while tears stream down her face, the oncoming headlights of another vehicle suggesting her death by car crash.

If Tanya pays dearly for her capitalist dreams, Vivian is a capitalist savior. This is Pretty Woman’s pseudo-feminist twist on the Cinderella cliché: the prince is just as much in need of saving as the woman. Edward: “So what happened after he climbed up the tower and rescued her?” Vivian: “She rescues him right back.” If the woman is saved from poverty, the man is saved from another kind of economic misery: his asshole life as a financial capitalist. This is foreshadowed in the middle of film, when Edward is in a business meeting and starts playing with some drinking glasses, stacking them on top of each other. “You know what I used to love when I was a kid, Phil? … Building blocks. Erector sets … We don’t build anything, Phil. We don’t make anything.” Through the love of Vivian, Edward will return to his childhood desire to build things, which in adult terms means becoming an industrial capitalist instead of a financial capitalist, a productive member of the real economy rather than a gambler in the speculative casino. Instead of gutting the fatherly Mr. Morse’s company, like he once did to his own father’s, he invests in its future. The film thus plays on the opposition between “parasitic” finance and “honest” manufacturing. While Tanya is punished for abandoning her mother, and Mother Russia, Vivian is not only saved but also redeems her redeemer, helping to turn him into a good capitalist and a good “son.”

Pretty Woman, Interdevochka, and Anora form a kind of trio. Cinematographically, they are all loving portraits of their respective cities, Los Angeles, Leningrad, and New York. It’s almost as if one needed the perspective of the sex worker to grasp the true beauty of urban space—and Baker’s films, if nothing else, are incredible walks (and drives) through urban undersides. Narratively, if Pretty Woman is an American fantasy, and Interdevochka a Soviet morality tale, twenty-first century Anora is about both Russia and America; or rather, it’s a story of the Soviet diaspora in the United States. Ani is a second- or third-generation immigrant—her name comes from the Uzbek or Tajik anor, pomegranate, as pointed out by Igor—who picked up decent-enough Russian from her grandma. Igor would seem to be a second-generation immigrant, also close to his grandma. Toros and his son Garnick are Armenians, belonging to the Russian-Armenian community of Brighton Beach. They are the descendants of those who wanted to escape the Soviet Union, and were more successful than Tanya. Toros, Garnick, and Igor do the bidding of the Zakharovs, who are Russian-based but effectively global citizens, with a mega-mansion in the Mill Basin neighborhood of Brooklyn (incidentally, a real-life Russian oligarch’s mansion).2 In Pretty Woman, Vivian gets her fairy-tale romantic ending; in Interdevochka Tanya is punished, speeding down a rain-swept highway to her death. What happens in Anora?

Contemporary cinema might congratulate itself on having a harder-hitting approach to capitalism as compared to the saccharine fantasy of Pretty Woman. But today’s highly successful genre of anti-capitalist movies and television is above all pacifying and reassuring: the capitalists are punished, the rich get their comeuppance, and the downtrodden achieve some measure of revenge. Even when this genre displays real genius (particularly in its comedy of manners—the analytic precision with which it dissects the speech and behavior of the hyper-privileged), it still partakes of this impotent morality. Succession, White Lotus, The Menu, Triangle of Sadness, Glass Onion, Parasite, Saltburn, Industry: one can loathe the rich and love them too. This was put well by Martha Gill: “We should recognize ‘eat the rich’ TV for what it is: not as any sort of cultural ‘reckoning’ for the prosperous and corrupt, but pure catharsis—a sort of inverted mirror of society. The more violently a culture squishes the undeserving wealthy on screen, the more it tends to valorize them in reality.”3 Truffaut once said that it’s impossible to make an anti-war film. What about an anti-rich film?

Strikingly, there’s no catharsis in Anora and no catharsis for Ani. Vanya doesn’t stand up to his parents or ever act like a man. “Speak to me like a man,” Ani demands, but he can’t even face her, literally putting on sunglasses when she tries to confront him—not to hide his shame (he has none) but simply to filter out the unpleasant stimulus she’s become. The rich get their way. Ani can’t hire a lawyer and sue for her half, as her family is threatened by momma oligarch. She can only submit to the inevitable, to implacable forces beyond her control. As Toros says in their first encounter, “This is what is going to happen,” and indeed that is what happens: the marriage is annulled and she receives a (relatively) small payout. Ani does get a bit of revenge on the mother in their exchange at the lawyer’s office in Vegas. She humiliates her, saying that her son hates her so much that he would marry a whore just to piss her off. But even this truth-telling doesn’t really hit its target. The father laughs at Ani’s insults because Ani is right—the family is totally emotionally bankrupt, but it ultimately doesn’t matter. There can be no moral victory when there are effectively no morals, no consequences, no responsibility, and no shame. Nothing changes and there is no hope.

After signing the divorce papers, Ani is escorted by Igor back to the mansion, where she’s allowed to gather her things and wait till the next morning when he can withdraw her cash. We then get a twist ending: Igor drives her home, and after carrying her luggage to the front door gets back into the car and presents Ani with her four-carat wedding ring, which he presumably pilfered from Toros. After a pause, Ani climbs on top of Igor and fucks him briefly before breaking into sobs. Cut to credits. This ending—with no music, only the sound of the car’s windshield wipers—has something quietly shocking about it. In a film full of music—including a perfect t.A.T.u. mic drop near the end of the second act, when a dead-drunk Vanya finally reappears in Ani’s former strip joint—we are left to contemplate in near silence what has happened during the past two hours and twenty minutes. The colorful, boisterous, sonorous comedy finishes in weird discomfort, a sudden sensory deprivation. It’s like the audience was robbed of enjoying these last post-filmic moments, of reveling in the spectacle that went on before.

How are we to understand this ending? There is something profoundly ambiguous and enigmatic in what takes place in Igor’s car, breaking with the preceding film and elevating it to another level. The scene has the ring of truth; but again, what truth? Ani holds herself with real dignity throughout the film. She is not intimidated, stands up for what’s hers, is full of indomitable and irrepressible life. She punches, she bites, she kicks, she lets loose one epic defiant scream. She also talks, bargains, listens, demands, charms. The situation is utterly hopeless but she never relents, even when defeated. It’s when Igor, in an act of kindness, produces the wedding ring and returns it to Ani that she finally breaks down. The idea of beating the Zakharovs, even a little, is too much. The sexual passage à l’acte that follows registers the impossibility of escape from the situation—that is, the impossibility of a satisfying catharsis, of any kind of revenge or comeuppance or change. It’s a desperate failed release where there is no release. The two ethical characters in the film are Ani and Igor, the stripper and the thug, who are in some ways kindred spirits: she lives at her sister’s house, he drives his grandma’s car, both are working-class next-generation immigrants. They are Anora’s real couple. Igor has respect for Ani almost from the start: after she decks him, he mutters to himself, “Impressive”; and in the Las Vegas lawyer’s office, he has the balls to suggest that Ivan should apologize, thus contradicting one of the fundamental laws of our world: the rich apologize to no one. Igor presents an odd mixture of brutality and gentleness. He wields violence when told, but is not without a soul. Everything that passes between them is coded by assault, the threat of rape (even parodied in an early scene where Igor inadvertently puts Ani in a doggy-style position), and slander (she calls him, to his bewilderment, a “faggot-ass bitch”). But they are, as it were, on the same side. What we get in Anora is neither a happy ending nor a moral reckoning, but an enigmatic encounter in which the characters can no longer conform to type: the thug cannot simply execute violence and the stripper cannot simply fuck, i.e., use sex to manipulate. It’s a scene of subjective breakdown which registers all the more powerfully the titular character’s ethical dignity.

In trying to grasp the tonality of the film, I am reminded of a line from Francis Bacon: “You can be optimistic and totally without hope.” The situation the characters find themselves in, being at the mercy of the rich, is totally without hope. The “hopeful” version of the script would be one in which Vanya does stand up to his parents and runs off with Ani, even at the price of losing his wealth—this is the film’s narrative lure. Or maybe another where the ruthless capitalist mother gains a grudging respect for her tough daughter-in-law, like in the last season of Fargo. But despite its grim closure, the impression the film gives is far from dreary or pessimistic. The hopeless optimism of Baker’s cinema lies in the sheer life that seems to almost burst out of the filmic frame, and, especially, his deep care for his characters, even Vanya.