Sean Baker, the American champion of true, artistically free indies, has entered the mainstream with his latest effort Anora (2024), hot on a fantastic festival run of winning the Palme d’Or and garnering Oscar buzz. Through its youth-targeted marketing—consisting of TikToks, a specially designed Letterboxd logo, free posters, and 35mm film strip giveaways during opening weekend showtimes (which worked as I eagerly attended a screening in NY during fall break)— Anora has gained decent box office numbers for a small-budget arthouse film. Nevertheless, for a longtime Baker enthusiast, I felt Anora was a departure from the artistic daringness that made him special in the first place, instead veering into tested “Indiewood” formulas.
Anora is an understandably likable film. The performances are charming across the board: Mikey Madison plays the amiable yet fiercely determined Ani, a Brighton Beach sex worker holding on to her new marriage; her new husband Ivan, son of Russian oligarchs, played by Mark Eydelshteyn, is captivatingly spontaneous with an amusing way of speaking English. The rest of the ensemble, namely Ivan’s guardians and bodyguards in his parents’ absence in the States, all bring their comedic chops to the story. The narrative is well-calibrated, carefully balancing its romantic, dramatic, and comedic tones throughout the runtime. Visually, its filmic look accentuates Ani’s emotions throughout the journey, mixing documentary-like handheld shots with carefully blocked sequences, notably the opening sequence in the strip club and the numerous sex scenes, a level of technical finesse that Baker has never quite reached before. Credits also have to be given to Baker for pushing the story of a sex worker, the subject of every Baker film since his breakout, Tangerine, into the zeitgeist that does not merely focus on trauma.
With that being said, the sharp, subversive edge in Baker’s work is lost in the new film. Tangerine (2015), for example, sets a radical trans representation through its non-normative iPhone cinematography and fragmented narrative. The Florida Project (2017) oversaturates the Orlando suburbs around Disneyland and unflinchingly depicts the complicated relationships between single parents and children living in that milieu. Red Rocket (2021), while being my least favorite, is an unapologetic look into modern masculinity that is toxic yet tragic through the ex-pornstar protagonist past his heyday. Every time I watched a Baker film, I felt challenged.
In Anora, Baker co-opts his niches into a much more digestible story. The film puts its sex worker protagonist into a Cinderella fairytale, defining her solely through her tragic circumstances and her pursuit of love. When bad things happen to her, the only agency she seems to have is to curse everyone in her Brighton Beach accent. When the intensely cold and heavily praised ending comes, it feels like an unearned symbolic gesture that reduces her to a stereotype. On the flip side, the film is equally uninterested in investigating the interiority of Russian oligarchs inflicting harm on Ani. Before watching Anora, anyone would have known that “rich people don’t want their sons to marry a prostitute.” As a result, the film lacks the typical sociological depth of Baker.
While one can make the argument that such middlebrow adult drama has found its place, how the figure of Anora fits into this narrative is not entirely unproblematic. The centerpiece of the film, the extended slapstick scene in Ivan’s apartment, builds its comedy on the pain and exploitation of Ani. This incredibly common, yet slightly misogynistic way of creating humor also shows up in the scene where Ani returns to the strip club, and another worker Diamond fights with her for the attention of Ivan. Perhaps the current state of comedy is more at fault, but this feels opposite to the sense of humor in Tangerine for instance, where profound empathy always goes hand in hand with outlandishly funny situations.
Looking back at Baker’s filmography, it seems like he lacked virality because he didn’t please his audience enough. If his objective is to gain audience appeal and break into the mainstream, he has more than succeeded with Anora. Such effort seems to come at a cost, yet Anora is much of a step up compared to other mainstream films in the current landscape on all fronts. The American micro-indie scene may have lost a giant, but Hollywood might welcome a figure it really needs.
