When Sophia Carnabuci was first contacted at Brooklyn’s Pumps strip club by an up-and-coming director, his offer sounded intriguing. Sean Baker was making an arthouse film he hoped would “destigmatise” sex work and wanted her to not only consult on it, but feature in it too.
“I’m a stripper, not an actor, but I’m down,” she remembers telling Baker.
A few years after that conversation, Carnabuci was in the south of France walking the red carpet at the Cannes festival, where the film has just won the Palme d’Or after premiering there last week.
Anora has already earned comparisons to Pretty Woman, but reviewers say the movie is a very modern update that breaks the “tired Hollywood mould”.
Anora follows the title character, an exotic dancer and occasional escort. A Russian speaker of Uzbek descent, Anora is tasked with entertaining Ivan, the reckless 21-year-old son of an oligarch, who has more money than sense and is looking for love in all the wrong places.
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Ivan asks Anora, or Ani, to be his “horny girlfriend for the week” in exchange for $15,000.
Ani takes an almost mercenary pleasure in getting men to part with their money. Ivan quickly ends up falling for her and proposes marriage while on a ketamine-induced bender in Las Vegas. “You’ve hit the lotto, bitch,” one of Ani’s friends at Headquarters, a strip club, jokes. Ani sees it as a chance at her own Cinderella story.
The film received a ten-minute standing ovation and was tipped for major prizes — including the top Cannes award, the Palme d’Or.
All the stripper characters are all played by working lapdancers, barring Anora, who is played by actress Mikey Madison. In Carnabuci’s acting debut, the 24-year-old takes up the role of Jenny, a dancer friend of Ani’s. Madison spent time researching the part with Carnabuci and another stripper from Pumps, who together informed much of the film’s dialogue.
“She was really curious about language and slang — how we approach customers, what ‘house fees’ are. We explained to her what a ‘whale’ is,” said Carnabuci, using the name they give big-money customers like Ivan.
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Scenes were shot in a real strip club — which meant they had to wrap filming every night by 5pm.
Carnabuci wore “pleasers” (transparent stilettos more commonly known as stripper heels) on the red carpet. “We thought it would be iconic for a couple of strippers to wear our working shoes,” she said. “We were telling Cannes, ‘We’re here too.’”
Baker, whose previous films include Tangerine, which followed trans sex workers in Los Angeles, offers Anora up as a foil to the “outdated” romantic comedy trope.
“Halfway through the edit, someone called out that it had similarities to Pretty Woman,” Baker acknowledged in press interviews after the screening. “I grew up in the Eighties. Pretty Woman had an effect on me. Maybe it was in my subconscious.”
The 1990 film, which featured an entanglement between the prostitute Vivian Ward (Julia Roberts) and her client Edward Lewis (Richard Gere), was met with a mixed reaction at the time of its release. Some interpreted it as having a feminist message, while others saw it — and continue to see it — as reinforcing gender stereotypes that disempower women.
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Where Roberts’s Vivian was entrepreneurial, Madison as Anora is the embodiment of “hustle culture”, as one critic described it, grabbing opportunity rather than waiting for it to be handed out.
Unlike Pretty Woman’s Disney ending, the real world comes crashing in for Ani early on when word of the wedding — and of Ani’s profession — gets back to Ivan’s parents, who send some heavies to set their son straight.
“I don’t think the film-maker has any particular affection for Pretty Woman, which has a totally unrealistic and retrograde image of sex work,” said Peter Debruge, a critic with the Hollywood trade newspaper Variety. “But it’s definitely a movie that would have shaped the title character’s fantasies of being swept off her feet by a charming client.”
Anora, which will be released later this year by indie distributor Neon, operates as an “anti-Pretty Woman”, The Daily Beast’s Esther Zuckerman wrote. “A happy ending never seems [on] the cards.”
Baker said he wanted to give a more nuanced portrayal of the power dynamic between stripper and client. “Anora has her power,” he said. “She’s in control. Even when the world is coming down on her.”
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It is Baker’s fifth film to centre around sex work, many of which offer a rare and unfiltered examination of the world’s oldest profession.
“I became friends with [sex workers] and realised there were a million stories from that world,” he said. “It’s helping remove the stigma that’s always been applied to this livelihood.”
Carnabuci said films like Anora help to work through an “internalised whoreaphobia”.
“The fact that the film is at Cannes, up for official selection, and there’s already an Oscar buzz around it, shows that the world is ready,” she said. “Next, we tell our own story.”
