deep-diving into Anora (2024)

Sean Baker’s 2024 film Anora gives us a peek into the glamorous world of New York strip clubs. We’re introduced to Ani, a young working-class sex worker from Brooklyn. As fate would have it, Ani’s broken Russian leads her to party boy Vanya, the son of a Russian oligarch. Their relationship unravels from soliciting sex to a fantasy of love. It’s only 45 minutes into the film when she quits her job at the club, because Baker’s story was not built to be a Cinderella story. Instead, Anora illustrates a different narrative, a lesson where fantasy was confused with reality. Watching this film through the lens of Sigmund Freud’s essay “Fetishism" and Judith Mayne’s “Lesbian Looks”, Anora can be seen as a film about the instability of sexual fantasy and the male gaze’s failure to wholly captivate its subject. Freud’s theory allows us to understand how Ani becomes a fetish object for Vanya; not a love interest, but merely a sexual substitution that gives him freedom to rebel and feel escape from his noble life. Mayne’s writings help us complicate this illusion, transitioning our focus from the lust of Ani as a display to understanding why there’s a display to begin with. We’re initially introduced to Ani as just a cog in the sex-work machine, but gradually revealed is how much true labor and vulnerability made her situation possible. Baker doesn’t ever paint Vanya as a villain or condemn his objectification, instead, the viewer enjoys the pleasures of their relationship alongside them until its inevitable collapse.

Freud’s “Fetishism” explains a fetish to be a substitution. It’s not only an object of sexual attraction, but it masks an absence or anxiety the subject is not capable of directly confronting. In Anora, Ani becomes a fetish object for Vanya. Although starting with sexual services, his lust for Ani isn’t explicitly sexual, but there also isn’t a capacity for depth to make it romantic. Vanya chooses to imagine himself as a wild socialite, liberated from his responsibilities of the real world, paying his way through the illusion; and Ani becomes that materialization. Vanya isn’t attracted to Ani just for her sexual accessibility or beauty, but because Ani embodies the complete opposite side of the spectrum; everything his aristocratic life lacks. To Vanya, Ani radiates impulsivity, risk, and vulgarity hidden in her perfectly unsurveilled world. Vanya’s fetishization is built from this wealth disparity dynamic; he experiences this oxymoronic illusion of intimacy, where the attention Ani gives him is both purchased and freely given. This contradiction is central to their fantasy, he experiences her desire while also relying on her staying poor to keep the accessibility. As their ‘romance’ unfolds, the transactionality disappears into the background. In a Freudian sense, Ani becomes the scapegoat that materializes Vanya’s double life and validates the existence his wild side.

The first example of this oxymoron is the beginning sequences in the club, where we learn how her attention is fueled by money. The club is her workplace, so she needs to read men quickly, and adjust her behavior to fit each fantasy. When Vanya asks for a Russian speaker, Ani snaps into her optimized desirability, using their mutual culture as leverage for negotiation. This matters, as Vanya views her American accent and English music as novel and exotic, but her broken Russian adds a level of familiarity. Out of the view of his family’s strict image, being with Ani is an exciting act of rebellion; and his fetish is built out of enjoying the pleasure of a forbidden world without ever losing the protection of his own.

Through the first hour of the film the viewer gets to be part of the fantasy; indulging in the ecstasy of Vanya’s hidden world, euphoric elaborate parties, and visually seductive displays of wealth and luxury. Vanya’s attention is genuine, and the transactional line continues to fade. Ani is accepted into their socialite world, and in Las Vegas, she’s able to fully immerse herself and play the role. When Vanya spontaneously confesses his love and they get married in Vegas, Ani's presence shifts from a fetish object to a legitimate being. For Vanya, this gesture is a game of chicken, for Ani, it’s a chance at a different life. This point of the film is where the dynamic completely shifts; and Ani’s demeanor shifts in the elusive balance in power. 

Judith Mayne’s “Lesbian Looks”, argues how cinema structures looking, how authorship shapes spectatorship, and how this shifts the positions assigned to the women on screen. Her reading of Dorothy Arzner shows that the problem is not only whether women are looked at, but how that look is placed and whether it allows female characters to exceed the visual and narrative roles imposed. Through this lens, Ani’s performance in the strip club not just evidence of objectification, it’s evidence of the control and intelligence needed to survive. She understands the look directed at her, and she knows how to manipulate it. This isn’t to say she’s free from exploitation, but it does show she’s not passive. Baker chose to place Ani in the sex work world, but the film shows how much work is needed to appear effortless. Layers of Ani’s sexual image are slowly broken off to reveal her depth to push the narrative. Baker doesn’t remove Ani, but he removes the stability she got from her old life. Her snappiness, volume, and aggression that made her entertaining for the first half of the film become her only outlets of desperation when Vanya’s family intervenes. 

The intervention by Vanya’s family signals the collapse of the fantasy. Once the marriage threatens the real interests of wealth and inheritance, Ani is no longer exciting or desirable, instead she becomes a problem to be contained. The men sent to manage it treat her as exactly who she was, a lower-class intrusion. Their physical handling of her juxtaposes the sexually physical world she escaped. This sequence of the film is also where Mayne’s concerns with spectatorship fit most. Ani is still being looked at, but the terms of looking have changed. Her body is no longer framed primarily through erotic display; it becomes evidence of struggle and exhaustion. Her shouting and fighting are attempts to force any form of recognition from the people whose mission is to erase her. The viewer is pushed away from the earlier pleasure of watching Ani perform and toward the discomfort of watching her physically overpowered; Baker turns the spectacle against itself. Ani remains visible, but her visibility no longer serves a fantasy; It exposes the violence needed to restore class order.

Vanya’s disappearance and later reappearance at the strip club intensifies this critique. His attempt to escape responsibility reveals that the rebellion Ani seemed to represent for him was never substantial. When confronted with consequences, he runs back to the safety of his status. The annulment scenes make the class politics of the film impossible to ignore; Vanya’s family possesses so much power that they’re able to turn Ani’s marriage into a temporary inconvenience. The legal and social meaning of marriage, which to Ani promised security, is revealed to be fragile when it conflicts with wealth. Ani can have the ring and title, but she could never make Vanya’s family recognize her. Ani saw the marriage as a possible transformation of her life.

The final car scene with Igor is the film’s most gutwrenching disruption of the gaze. When Igor returns Ani’s ring, the gesture is small but meaningful. Unlike Vanya, Igor was able to see Ani’s shame without fully reducing her to it. Ani responds by initiating sex, which returns the film to the only terms in which she held power throughout the story. Yet when Igor tries to kiss her, Ani breaks down. The kiss interrupts the logic of performance because it suggests tenderness rather than transaction. It asks Ani to be emotionally present at the exact moment when her ability to perform has been exhausted. This breakdown is not a simple revelation of Ani’s “true self”. Baker’s film is more complex than that. Through Freud, this moment reveals the damage left behind after Ani was made to act as a fetish object. She had been desired as fantasy, embraced as a spectacle, and then discarded. Through Mayne, the same moment marks a breakdown in spectatorship. Ani can no longer be consumed as erotic image, her grief interrupts the viewer’s look.

Sean Baker’s authorship matters because Anora fits into his broader interest in captivating people living within economic instability while refusing to define them only through their misery. In Anora, this prevents the critique from becoming simplistic. The fantasy works because it makes the viewer feel good before it becomes cruel. This is why Anora is not merely a story about a rich man soliciting a sex worker, it’s about how sexual fantasy balances looking, desire, and power. Freud and Mayne's perspectives reveal the central meaning of Anora: the film constructs Ani as a fetishized image and then allows that image to collapse. Freud exemplifies how Vanya’s desire depends on substitution. Ani becomes the object through which he imagines freedom while avoiding the reality of his dependence on wealth and family power. Mayne demonstrates how the film shifts the terms of looking, making the audience confront the labor and vulnerability behind Ani’s sexual performance. Baker’s film does not ask for sympathy by presenting Ani as innocent or pure; it insists that Ani deserves respect as she is.