ANORA and the World's Oldest Profession

A century's worth of work in cinema

Nov 03, 2024

Palme d’Or-winning American indie Anora is starting to break out beyond the arthouse crowd, if anecdotal evidence counts for anything. Sean Baker’s American indie takes viewers on a wild ride with Mikey Madison's Ani (formally Anora), a young Brooklyn stripper who captures the attention of Mark Eydelshteyn’s Ivan, a Russian oligarch’s son, in her place of business. Their whirlwind romance results in a Vegas marriage that so displeases Ivan’s parents that they send a set of Armenian henchmen after the couple to get their union annulled.

It’s one of the year’s most fun and unpredictable movies, though if you are at all familiar with the cinema of Sean Baker, you might have guessed that it will skillfully weave in trenchant insights about the nature of class and status in America. The five films he’s made since 2012’s Starlet have all prominently used sex work as an avenue to explore ideas and attitudes toward people living on the margins of society. Anora puts an emphatic capper on them all, and somewhere along the crazy journey, I felt Baker asked a question that could sum up all the movies: “Would any of this be possible if America just had a normal, less prudish attitude toward sex?”

Anora does, however, exist in the context of all that came before it. I had the chance to interview Baker (along with Madison) last month, and its position as the latest in a legacy of films tackling sex work came up. “There are iconic films—unfortunately, few and far between,” Baker explained before listing a few direct influences. “Empathetic approaches to the subject matter, I was definitely in tune with them. Those films, in many ways, set the path for this film and showed me the way.”

Read our full interview

Even as expressions of sexuality on screen have been largely curtailed due to censorship, the world’s oldest profession — as it’s often jokingly referred to — has long proven a subject of fascination for filmmakers across the globe. It’s entirely possible to trace the evolution of the last century off-screen by looking at how depictions of sex work changed on-screen. I’d point you to an excellent BBC feature written by my friend Rafaela Sales Ross on how these shifts are manifesting more in today’s cinema. But for a wider lookback window, I’ve curated a list of films, one per decade, that help light the way to Anora.

It should go without saying: given the subject matter, you know what you’re getting into by watching one of these films. Baker is not using Anora as a political soapbox, though he’s long been an advocate for the decriminalization of sex work. If any of these films spark your interest in exploring the subject, I've asked some friends who are more familiar with the topic for good places to start. Look at the harm reduction work being done in D.C. by HIPS and the Portland-based Haymarket Pole Collective that takes an intersectional lens toward providing legal and educational support for sex workers if you’re curious.

Now, on with the show…

1930s — La Chienne

Jean Renoir’s La Chienne (translation: The Bitch) provides an early example of how sex workers would appear in cinema at a time in which on-screen depictions of sensuality were still largely taboo. Renoir’s film paints Janie Marèse’s prostitute Lulu as a treacherous trap for an unhappily married man. This forerunner of the American film noir genre (which was remade in 1946 by Fritz Lang within the studio system as Scarlett Street, a fascinating point of comparison) seizes on the era’s inherent distrust of women who leverage pleasure as their profession. Women like Lulu are cunning, often conniving, figures who seize on the weakness of men in the throes of carnal desire — and often face tragic ends in order to restore and reify a system that centers sex as solely an act within the confines of marriage.

La Chienne is available on The Criterion Channel.

1940s — Women of the Night

Inspired by the Italian neorealist tradition born out of postwar devastation for the losing nations, Japanese director Kenzi Mizoguchi turned a similarly unblinking eye toward his own country. His 1948 film Women of the Night follows three women as they turn to prostitution (or perhaps fall into it, depending on your perspective). I do think Mizoguchi brings an undeniable sense of humanity to all the women in the film, but the very conceit is a classic example of a common trope: the sex worker as a tragic figure who only turns to the profession at absolute rock bottom. The film captures the mood of a country uncertain of how it can rise from the rubble following World War II in both broad archetypal strokes and specific details. Mizoguchi documents their travails with undeniable compassion even as it looks on with terror at what the destitution of Japan has left them to battle. And amidst it all, Women of the Night shows the seeds of solidarity between the women who know they must stand together because no one else in their country will stand up for their basic dignity.

Women of the Night is available on The Criterion Channel (but also just on YouTube at the link below).

1950s — Nights of Cabiria

Sex workers abound in the cinema of Federico Fellini, but none captures the heart quite like Giulietta Masina’s titular fireball in Nights of Cabiria. While she’s still somewhat of a tragic figure in the sense that she seems to attract all of society’s worst impulses like a magnet, Fellini sees that as but the beginning of her story. Cabiria represents the sex worker as a resilient and redemptive figure, someone who can spot the sunshine through the storm as she endures repeated insults to her dignity. Fellini lifts up a figure like Cabiria on the margins of society, forces us to walk alongside her, and then challenges us to carry that same sympathy out into the world. The film’s final sequence never fails to move me to tears as Cabiria picks herself up after suffering an egregious insult to her pride and joins a parade of performers along the road. She looks around as they begin to restore her faith in the goodness of others before locking eyes directly with the camera and giving us a nod. Few fourth-wall breaks cut so directly to the soul as Masina’s gentle gaze.

Nights of Cabiria is available to rent on Amazon.

1960s — Belle du Jour

The sexual revolution came for the cinematic depiction of sex workers in Luis Buñuel’s Belle du Jour. The Spanish surrealist filmmaking (a contemporary of Salvador Dalí) had long examined repressed sexual desire in his work, dating back even as far as his inscrutable avant-garde shorts like Un chien andalou and L’Age d’Or. Catherine Deneuve’s Séverine Serizy represents a new vanguard of cinematic sex workers who have undeniable agency in choosing their craft. This stilted French housewife bereft by sexual fantasies that remain unfulfilled within her marriage turns to spending her afternoons seeing clients at a high-class brothel. Over half a century later, Buñuel’s film still startles with its provocative insistence that some women turn to prostitution not out of destitution but instead from their own desire.

Belle du Jour is available on Max and the Criterion Channel.

1970s — Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

If you know Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman for any act, it’s probably for Delphine Seyrig’s titular character making veal cutlets day after day in painstaking, unbreaking detail. Sight & Sound’s newly crowned best film of all time is a masterclass in durational filmmaking as Akerman’s dispassionate camera fixates on routines. This approach allows us to see how simple breaks in a pattern are more dramatic moments than any scripted moment for a character’s development. But Jeanne Dielman is more than just a silently suffering housewife — she’s also a sex worker, and the film gives as much weight to her activities in the bedroom as it does to those in the kitchen. This hands-off approach might have sparked a delayed revolution in the depictions of sex workers. Sex work as a matter-of-fact subject free from sensationalization or moralization feels like something only just beginning to gain appreciation and traction, just as Akerman’s film rising to canonical status took decades in its own right.

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is available on Max and The Criterion Channel.

1980s — Working Girls

Lizzie Borden’s Working Girls goes out to all the ladies who have been told to “smile more” at work. An under-recognized part of women’s jobs, especially but not entirely in the service sector, revolves around doing additional work to manage the feelings of customers and clients. But rather than making these characters subservient in the story, Borden places the needs of these laborers at their center to show the personal drain of having to bend over backward in service. You could pair Working Girls with just about any movie about the workplace, and it’d be a killer double feature. This Reagan-era parable finds relatable parallels to just about any corporate environment inside its upscale Manhattan bordello. Borden understands that sex workers are workers subject to the same economic pressures as anyone else and operates from that simple truth to hilarious effect.

Working Girls is available on Max and the Criterion Channel.

1990s — Pretty Woman

When thinking about the role Garry Marshall’s Pretty Woman — a smash box office hit that cemented the superstardom of Julia Roberts — plays in the role of cinematic depictions of sex work, it’s just as important to consider the movie they didn’t make. Pretty Woman was originally titled 3000 after the going rate for a Los Angeles prostitute at the time and sought to shine a light on issues like violence and drug abuse that plagued the community. But this sanitized retelling of Cinderella or Pygmalion about a “hooker with a heart of gold,” depending on who you ask, represents an American society at a crossroads in its relationship to sex and sex work. On the one hand, you could consider it a sign of progress that a Hollywood heroine could be a sex worker. On the other, it’s not particularly interested in the details of her trade and presents sex work as more of an abstract concept lest it turn off the pearl-clutching audience. Anora’s marketing boasts that it “makes Pretty Woman look like a Disney movie,” which I think indicates just how much of a stronghold this movie has over people’s conceptions of prostitution.

Pretty Woman is available on Max.

2000s — Mysterious Skin

Thus far, every movie I’ve mentioned has been about heterosexual cisgender women exchanging their services with men. It’s been convenient to map traditional hierarchies of gender and sexual orientation onto stories about sex work because they tend to echo the existing imbalances in society. But starting in the new millennium, stories involving male sex workers engaged in relations with other men began to rise in prominence as the queer community battled for visibility in the wake of AIDS’ devastation. Gregg Araki (who I recently interviewed!) rose from this movement of New Queer Cinema and followed up his doom-inflected teen trilogy with Mysterious Skin, which may be one of the most devastating movies I’ve ever seen. The film follows the diverging trajectories of two young men who were molested by a coach in their childhood — Brady Corbet’s Brian becomes obsessed with alien abduction fantasies as he withdraws from the world, while Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Neil leans into hedonism and becomes a sex worker starting at the age of 15. Araki unflinchingly looks at sex work manifesting as a trauma response to sexual abuse, a way of reclaiming one’s sense of sexual agency when a predatory adult steals it from someone. Mysterious Skin poses hard questions without easy answers, daring its viewers to engage with difficult and transgressive expressions of sexual identity.

Mysterious Skin is available to rent on Amazon.

2010s — Cam

It’s impossible not to note the tremendous effect the Internet has had on sex work, both in terms of making imagery more widely available as well as reducing the barriers of contact with those producing such content. Daniel Goldhaber’s psychological horror film Cam analyzes this sea change from the supply side rather than the demand side. Madeline Brewer’s Alice works as a camgirl under the name “Lola_Lola” unbeknownst to many in her life. This dual identity comes back to haunt her when a hacker takes over her account and begins a series of scarily successful imitations of her online persona, a genre-tinged dramatization of the sex worker’s routine loss of agency. Goldhaber and his creative partner Isa Mazzei, a former camgirl in real life, conjure up the darker side of sex work’s ubiquity and accessibility in the online age even as it opens up more economic opportunities for those inclined to participate. Those scares are further underscored by Alice’s struggle echoing the split personas between our digital and physical realities that we all assume, regardless of professions and proclivities.

Cam is available on Netflix.

2020s — Good Luck to You, Leo Grande

And now we arrive at our current decade, epitomized by a film like Anora or Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, a more light-hearted comedy about an older woman (Emma Thompson) hiring a sex worker (Darryl McCormack) to teach her how to achieve the orgasm that her late husband was never able to provide. Films like this position the sex worker as the one with something to teach, not as the one with something to learn. It is they who understand the sick double standards that trap people in unfulfilling situations which ultimately cause many problems downstream of their thwarted desire. There’s still much stigma that Thompson’s Nancy must unlearn, perhaps making her the perfect stand-in for a contemporary audience. But by engaging with the humanity of a sex worker, she comes to understand that her desire is not inherently problematic and sex workers are more than meets the eye.

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is available on Hulu.

During NYFF, I had the special opportunity to interview two of the directors of the documentary No Other Land, Yuval Abraham and Basel Adra, for Slant Magazine. This Israeli-Palestinian duo models the world of equality, justice, and safety for all human beings that they are working toward by fighting for the West Bank community of Masafer Yatta. While the film is currently only slated for a one-week run through 11/7 at New York’s Film at Lincoln Center, please keep an eye out for this one — especially those who might be inclined to conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism and thus write a blank check to Benjamin Netanyahu’s egregious disregard for human life.

You can keep track of all the freelance writing I’ve done this year through this list on Letterboxd.

You can always keep up with my film-watching in real-time on the app Letterboxd. I’ve also compiled every movie I’ve ever recommended through this newsletter via a list on the platform as well.

I found this was a comprehensive, digestible overview about how the business of Netflix has changed the entire art form of filmed entertainment.

Judy Berman’s TIME essay about the emerging “gentle man” archetype ties together a scary amount of cultural threads. Highly encourage you take the time to read it through.

I hope I’ll have the chance to say more about Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain, which begins its theatrical rollout this weekend, at a later date. But for now, I think this New York Times piece (gift article) about how it embodies the third generation of Holocaust art is worth your time.

And look, I had a great time reading The Cut’s profile of 2024 breakout Twitter/X star @baldanndowd.