is an extremely fun film, something which could be gleaned from the pace of the trailer but not necessarily from director Sean Baker’s oeuvre. It does have many of the markers of his style — great soundtrack, great visuals, great dialogue — but this is possibly the most fun we’ve seen him have directing. Most importantly, this is possibly the most fun I’ve had in the cinema all year, which makes ’s heart-shattering revelations all the more compelling.
Our first glimpse of Anora establishes the slightly ironic, slightly indulgent tone of the film. This is a film swathed in neon lights and sequined lingerie: it is meant to capture and enchant you in the same way that Anora and her coworkers do their clients. Simultaneously we are shown the “other side” of sex work, the unglamorous and artificial one, an admittedly well-traversed setting in film and TV that is, nonetheless, done quite well here.
Baker handles the sexuality of the film very delicately: at no point does it feel gratuitous or unnecessarily exploitative, despite the ample nudity. Questions of gender stay mostly in the background as he seems more comfortable focusing on class imbalance, which is familiar ground for him. Still, looking back at the last Baker feature with a female protagonist, , we see a similar eye for small nuances in performance — the flicker of an eye, the doubtful tone — that carry so much weight, that so subtly reinforce the glass ceilings our characters struggle beneath, unti.
