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Spoilers for Anora.
It’s no great secret that Hollywood has long peddled a certain sexist fantasy to women – the fantasy that true love means being saved. It goes something like this: a young woman in dire circumstances meets a wealthy or powerful man and, against all odds, they fall in love and her troubles melt away. This outdated fantasy has cropped up in numerous iconic on-screen love stories, whether it’s Disney’s Cinderella, any Jane Austen adaptation, the 1954 Audrey Hepburn film Sabrina, Jennifer Lopez’s 2002 Maid in Manhattan, just about every Netflix Christmas movie about a pretend European prince, or, perhaps most famously, Garry Marshall’s Pretty Woman.
Anora has already created quite a stir for supposedly debunking this trope. Directed by Sean Baker, the film follows Ani (Mikey Madison), a young erotic dancer and sex worker, who has a whirlwind romance with Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), a young wealthy Russian client. After the pair spontaneously marry in Las Vegas, Ani thinks she has won the lottery – but her fantasy soon comes crashing down when Ivan’s parents and connections arrive to bring the young couple back to reality. In other words, the film sets us up for the all-too familiar rags-to-riches romance then throws the picture-perfect Hollywood fantasy back into our faces in a dizzying explosion of glitter and neon.
It's so much more than a “bonkers thriller”.
It is therefore, as so many critics have noted, the anti-Pretty Woman: the story of a sex worker who doesn’t get her Hollywood happy ending, it is being lauded as a feminist triumph. But in dismantling this fantasy, Baker’s film isn’t as exactly empowering as it appears. Why? Because the film fails to dig into the sexism that is embedded into the fantasy itself. Instead of flipping the Pretty Woman narrative by saying “she doesn’t need to be saved” or even “she can save herself”, the film gives us a new fantasy that hinges around the male gaze. It suggests “she just needs to be saved by the right guy, by a good guy – he might not be rich, but he’ll really understand her.”
Our heroine does want to be saved. She daydreams about her own Disney ending and when she meets Ivan, her fairy tale seems like it’s coming true. First, Ivan asks her to be his “girlfriend for a week.” He agrees to her $15,000 terms and the pair spend a luxurious whirlwind week together pouring his parents’ money into slot machines, knocking back champagne and generally partying it up till dawn. Ivan spontaneously asks Anora to marry him; she, after a moment of disbelief at her luck, says yes. It’s not exactly a love story for the ages, but he’s nice (or seems to be) and they have fun together. The fantasy seems to have reached its conclusion – in a blissful montage, the ecstatic couple dart into a Las Vegas chapel and tie the knot. Ani heads back to her grimey club to collect her things and flaunt her success to her co-workers. “You caught your whale,” one of them says enviously. If the film was Pretty Woman, it would end here.
However, the film continues on at its breakneck pace. Days into their marital bliss, Ivan receives a knock on the door. Two Armenian men - “heavies”, you could say - have arrived, hired by Ivan’s Russian parents, to deliver a reality check: the marriage must be annulled. Evidently, they do not deem a sex worker to be a suitable bride. Instead of fighting for his new bride, Ivan scurries off fearfully, deserting Ani with the two men – as hired bodyguards go, they are, luckily, rather bumbling, hapless ones.
From here on out, the Pretty Woman fantasy crumbles before Ani’s eyes. Ivan is not the saviour she hoped, but rather a petulant overgrown man-child. His family treats her like dirt.
It is, of course, heartbreaking to see this young girl’s hope for a brighter future come crashing down. But Baker fails to delve into the problem with the fantasy itself. Instead, the film seems to suggest that if only Ani had caught a more reliable whale, none of this would have happened. There’s nothing wrong with the fantasy of being saved by man, the film seems to suggest, other than the fact that… well… it’s pretty unlikely.
Instead of challenging Hollywood’s insistence on framing women merely as “people who want to be saved,” Baker takes us in another, slightly bizarre direction. Rather than watching Ani come crashing down to reality through her own eyes, we see her third act almost entirely through the eyes of another: Igor, the kind-hearted bodyguard who has been tasked with keeping her under control until the annulment is complete. It is through his gaze that we see Ani sit quietly in the back of a car, confront Ivan’s mother, or watch TV. Repeatedly, the camera pans from him to her, or, there he is, lurking in the background of a shot of her. It dawns on the viewer that Igor is falling for Ani – and in spite of how they met, Ani is drawn to him, too.
It stars Scream queen Mikey Madison.
Why does Baker choose to frame his heroine through a man’s eyes? Is it because that way, at least someone sees her as more than a sex worker? At least someone sees that she’s a smart, savvy, vivacious young woman? It’s a decidedly odd choice. After all, a big part of Ani is repelled by Igor. From her perspective, he’s the guy who kidnapped her and tied her up with a phone cord. But after watching Igor watch Ani and really see her – or at least see her more than the other characters do – we are almost persuaded to root for them. And, hey, as Igor himself says, he’s “not a rapist!” Bonus points for that, I guess!
The pair don’t have a happily ever after. Instead, the film ends with a harrowing sexual encounter between them in which Ani finally breaks down emotionally. In this final, complicated encounter, we see Ani at her most vulnerable and most exposed now that her fantasy has been shattered. Somewhat annoyingly, we still witness this breakdown through the lens of Igor.
By the end of the film, Igor has effectively become our narrator. The effect? The dismantling of the Pretty Woman trope doesn’t actually happen. At least not in the way we expect it to. Anora may seem to break down the Pretty Woman fantasy, but in its place, it presents us with a different version of the very same fantasy seen through the male gaze. Igor’s version of the fantasy hinges around the good guy if not getting the girl, at least deserving her. What if the average guy, the kind of guy who even sometimes does bad things, was actually the Richard Gere character? Sure, on the surface the film may appear to do away with the trope. But look a little deeper, and you’ll see that fantasy is still there, just as strong and unrelenting as ever.
