Sean Baker’s subversion of the American dream

The speech was in line with what Baker said last year, when Anora won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and he dedicated the film “to sex workers past, present and future". During recent interviews, both Baker and his wife Samantha Quan (co-producer on most of his films, including Anora) have repeatedly spoken about the de-stigmatization of sex work, legal protections and so on. Anora is a comedy-drama about Anora, or Ani (Mikey Madison), a stripper who marries Yuri (Mark Eydelshteyn) the immature failson of a Russian oligarch, after he pays her $15,000 for a week with him. It enjoyed a big night at the Oscars, winning five awards including Best Film, Best Director, Best Film Editing and Best Original Screenplay for Baker and Best Actress for Mikey Madison.

Also read: Oscars 2025, ‘Anora’ and the fabulous Baker boy

The film’s success is the culmination of Baker’s body of work across the last decade or so — outside of Anora, this comprises Starlet (2012), Tangerine (2015), The Florida Project (2017) and Red Rocket (2021). In Starlet and Red Rocket, the lead characters are porn actors, while Tangerine, The Florida Project and Anora are stories involving sex workers. Baker’s work portrays these characters at the fringes of society with a palpable sense of empathy and a wide range of tonalities, from straight drama and pathos to dramedy, slapstick and black humour.

The opening phase of Baker’s career was marked by two journalistic, cinema verité-style films focusing on the lives of immigrant communities in America. Take Out (2004), co-directed with Shih-Ching Tsou, follows an undocumented Chinese immigrant struggling to pay off the smugglers who brought him to the United States. In Prince of Broadway (2008), Adu is a recent immigrant from Ghana selling knockoffs in New York’s fashion district, whose life is upended after his ex-girlfriend turns up out of the blue with the toddler son he never knew he had. Baker’s basic methodology here was to present believable working-class characters (what Matt Zoller Seitz later called “the rainbow coalition of America’s underclass", in his review of Red Rocket) in realistic situations, and let the simple dramatic beats of the story sort themselves out, often with non-professional actors improvising their lines.

The film that marked a turning point in Baker’s career was the comedy-drama Tangerine (2015). This film placed Sin-Dee Rella (Kitana Rodriguez) and Alexandra (Mya Taylor), a pair of Black transgender sex workers, in an old-timey Hollywood comedy-of-errors/love triangle with Sin-Dee’s pimp-cum-boyfriend. Shot with a modified iPhone 5S’s widescreen camera, Tangerine saw Baker retaining the core of his lo-fi style while also mounting more classical cinematic frames for the first time. Last year, Greta Gerwig, part of the jury that awarded Anora the Palme d’Or at Cannes, compared Baker to Howard Hawks. When you see Tangerine, you instantly understand why—this is essentially a ‘girlfriend movie’ set on Christmas Eve.

Tangerine’s memorable ending scene sees Alexandra offering Sin-Dee her own wig after the latter’s clothes and hair are ruined. By then, the two friends have realized how they have each betrayed and hurt the other — but they are also sharing a moment of silent solidarity. This set the pattern for dramatic, morally complex conclusions to Baker’s films. In Red Rocket, Mikey “Saber" Davies (Simon Rex) a washed-up male porn star spends much of the movie in predator mode, nudging 17-year-old Strawberry into joining the porn industry with him. But thanks in part to a remarkable performance by Simon Rex, we also feel bad for Mikey when he is viciously beaten by Strawberry’s ex-boyfriend and his family.

Compared to Tangerine and Red Rocket, Anora is a much more conventionally mounted story that seeks to subvert Pretty Woman and other ‘Hollywood hooker’ movies. Which is also why its straightforwardness and its sly repurposing of the male gaze (like the neon-lit gyrations of its opening section, set in the club Ani works at) have been frequently mistaken for ‘glorification’ of sex work.

Two scenes in particular have received a lot of attention, both laudatory and otherwise. In the first, Ani’s fantasies of escaping her stripper life are brought down to earth when Vanya’s father’s goons arrive and demand an annulment. They bind and gag her, upon which she repeatedly yells ‘rape’. Baker chooses to introduce dark humour in this scene via their reaction, an artistic choice that comes dangerously close to what we could call a ‘rape joke’ today. I say this mindful of the fact that fear-of-rape is a heavily gendered phenomenon — I didn’t think the scene came close to a rape joke at all.

The other Anora scene that has drawn a wide range of misinterpretations is the concluding scene, where Ani reacts to a small act of kindness by Igor (one of the aforementioned goons) by climbing on top of him, but breaking down in tears when he tries to kiss her. Again, this isn’t some clumsy attempt at a ‘happy ending’ or to suggest the old hoary stereotype about sex workers needing the “right" kind of man to ‘save’ her. Anora is a movie about class, specifically about power relations as they pertain to class and gender. Ani naively believes that because of Vanya’s emotional and sexual inexperience she has power over him, a notion shattered by the bind-and-gag scene. Vanya foolishly believes he can defy his overbearing mother and marry Ani on a lark. Igor is convinced that his crush on Ani and his puppy-dog glances can make up for the violence he inflicted on her.

The climactic scene, at least to me, was about the hired girl and the hired gun realizing that they are dark mirrors to one another, cogs caught in a meat-grinder of a system that breaks their bodies and corrodes their souls.

The Florida Project ended with two beleaguered children, faced with impending separation and the foster care system, escaping hand in hand to the nearby Disney Magic Castle. Now, Baker has won four Oscars on the same night, tying the all-time record with Walt Disney. He has the keys to the castle now. It will be interesting to see where he goes from here.

Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based journalist.