In Anora, a wilful young woman engaged in sex work is swept up in a Cinderella story. Anora, or Ani as everyone calls the titular character, who is played with mercurial force by Mikey Madison, cozies up with a rich young brat (Mark Eidelstein), the spoiled son of a Russian oligarch with mob ties. Their whirlwind romance quickly unleashes clock-strikes-midnight chaos across Manhattan, Brighton Beach and Coney Island.
The movie, written and directed by Tangerine and The Florida Project’s Sean Baker, is a deliriously entertaining and moving screwball comedy that takes notes from Preston Sturges and Federico Fellini. Those film-makers, like Baker, have always been hyperaware of class and economics, accepting wholeheartedly that love and romance, with all its joys and tragedy, is transactional. But to make such stories ring true and authentic like few have before, Baker has also been taking notes from sex workers.
“He seeks to engage the community, rather than other us,” the Toronto-based writer and performer Andrea Werhun said to the Guardian. She’s the author behind the sex work memoir Modern Whore. She’s also chief among the dancers and escorts that Baker tapped as paid consultants while making Anora. Werhun was on hand to advise on the script and Madison’s astonishing performance, offering lived-in details that Baker absorbed into the film, which is now being touted as a major Oscar contender following its Palme d’Or win at this year’s Cannes film festival. When picking up that prize in May, Baker dedicated it “to all sex workers, past, present and future”.
Sex work is often present in Baker’s film: it’s a job that connects the joyous women in Tangerine, a thrilling slice-of-life comedy; it’s a peripheral but risky engagement for a single mom in the heart-wrenching drama The Florida Project; and it’s just another side hustle in Red Rocket, a character study set among the working class in Texas. These movies tend to keep trauma at bay – because there are plenty of other depictions of sex workers that focus solely on their victimization, if not vilification. Instead, Baker explores all the other emotions that come with just being human, which sadly feels exceptional when telling sex worker’s stories. And he achieves a nuance and sensitivity that comes from working in collaboration with the people his films are about.
“That’s why his work really speaks to sex workers,” says Werhun. “We feel seen by the work that he puts in. He always finds the human story. He always finds the funny story, which is a really important part of humanizing people, especially marginalized people. When you can find the funny, that’s pretty powerful.”
Like Baker, Werhun leans into comedy, both in conversation and in her work. She’s a performer, in film and in her online content, who tends to play the vixen with hints of knowing satire – though occasionally you’ll catch her go full Jim Carrey, blessed with as much elasticity in her face to put on the silliest expressions. Her humour also dominates Modern Whore, in which she offers up incisive observations about clients – who can be comforting, reliable, frustrating or dangerous – and a society at large that still stigmatizes the world’s oldest profession. When Werhun comically expresses exasperation, she finds the funny without losing sight of the tragedy.
We’re having this conversation while Werhun is sitting in the makeup chair on the Toronto set of the Modern Whore movie, a feature adaptation directed by her regular collaborator Nicole Bazuin. Baker is an executive producer.
The book – which was self-published in 2017 before Penguin Random House released an expanded (or rather, “engorged”) edition in 2022 – is a collaborative work. In it, Werhun shares provocative and insightful anecdotes from her time as a private escort and then a dancer at a Toronto strip club. She writes about satisfying curious fantasies and fighting to maintain boundaries with entitled clients, and explains why a sex worker’s trauma is not automatically up for consumption. Those stories and observations are paired with tastefully seductive and artful portraits of the author, composed and photographed by Bazuin.
In Modern Whore the movie, which we expect to premiere next year, Werhun is playing a version of herself. The hybrid documentary mixes talking head interviews with heightened dramatic re-creations, framing excerpts from Werhun’s memoirs through a genre lens. She shows up like a femme fatale or a “hooker with a heart of gold”, as if to reclaim cinematic tropes.
Modern Whore, the book and the film, plays with the tension between genre and reality, fantasy and the labour that goes into creating it. That tension is there in Anora too. When Ani is at work, negotiating lap dances and securing payment, her exceptional customer service makes it seem like the arrangement is not transactional at all. She’s performing a fantasy. But everything behind that performance – the labour of it all – is mundane.
Anora puts the labour out front, demystifying through granular details: the routines, the shifts, even the Tupperware that Ani eats from on the job. Werhun points out that she actually had a direct hand in that latter bit: “Sean had asked me, ‘If you walk into the strip club locker room, what might you see?’ And I said, ‘Well, you might see a dancer eating her dinner out of Tupperware on her break before going back down to the floor.’ He’s like, ‘Oh I love that!’”
There are so many other details and character dynamics in Anora that will naturally feel familiar to anyone who read Werhun’s memoirs: the warm and supportive dynamic between colleagues at the strip club, which, as with any workplace, can be compromised by some frosty competitiveness; the sense of ownership some dancers feel over their loyal clientele; and an irrational but no less stinging sense of betrayal when those “loyal” customers look for variety in other dancers. That doesn’t necessarily mean Anora lifts those dynamics from the book, just that there’s a shared authenticity when community has a hand in shaping these stories. Her story is part of a larger evolution in sex worker representation.
Consider the milestones in the decade since Baker made Tangerine. Cardi B went from the strip club to a hip-hop star on reality TV. Sex workers have been owning their own stories on social media – think A’Ziah Wells King’s infamous Twitter thread (AKA The Thotyssey) narrating a wild trip to Florida, which became the basis for the movie Zola. Recent films, like Oscar-winning Poor Things, are boasting more enlightened views on sex work. And we’re now at the point where sex workers are not just consulting on films like Anora that authentically represent their community, but making their own.
“I think that there’s a logical next step,” says Werhun. “When you have civilians who are making films about sex workers – who do the work of humanizing us – that opens the door to sex worker creators making films at the same level.”
“One of the most amazing things an ally can do is open that door.”
Anora opens in US cinemas on 18 October and in the UK on 1 November
