Sean Baker’s Anora Is a Riotous Celebration of Working-Class Life
Just a few minutes into Anora, there’s a small but telling detail in a small but important moment: The movie starts in a strip club, with a montage of incidents in which Anora, one of the club’s dancers, picks up clients for private sessions.Â
You can see she’s good at it—at handling them, at dealing with their different ages and circumstances, and at getting them to fork over money, to buy what she’s selling. It’s just a sales job, really, and she’s good at the work. And in this movie’s worldview, it really is just work.
So when the film’s first pivotal moment comes—a man at the club is asking for a dancer who speaks Russian—it happens in a break room, the sort of unassuming, back-of-the-house space, with lockers on the wall and coworkers getting ready for their shifts, one found in so many working-class, service sector workplaces. And Anora is sitting on a bench eating from a Tupperware container.Â
Written and directed by Sean Baker, the filmmaker behind Red Rocket and The Florida Project, among other movies, Anora is a movie about working-class life, the comedy and tragedy at the margins of American life. It’s shot through with this sort of subtle juxtaposition—of moneyed glamor with working-class reality, of the pull of money and the ways that almost every interaction also involves some sort of transaction, of the workaday reality of labor and the ways workers must contort themselves, sometimes literally, for their wealthy benefactors. Yes, the movie gestures loosely left-leaning concerns about capitalism and exploitation, but mostly it’s about the dignity of work and the courage of self-reliance. It’s a joyous, sad, messy, chaotic, sprawling, anything-goes romp through a very particular part of the American scene, and it’s one of the best movies of the year.Â
At heart, Anora is just a grittier, funnier, more screwball
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