“Anora” is a strip-club Cinderella story—and a farce to be reckoned with.

Earlier this year, the Cannes Film Festival made a heroic first observation: the director who won the Palme d'Or, the event's highest honor, dedicated the award “to all sex workers, past, present and future.” No one familiar with director Sean Baker could have been too surprised. Baker has spent his career—and his palm-laureled latest, “Anora,” a comedy about a Brooklyn stripper—chasing American hustlers of every stripe. She became an indie darling with “Starlet” (2012), a drama about San Fernando Valley industrial pornography, and “Tangerine” (2015), a buddy comedy about Los Angeles-based transgender sex workers. From there, Baker headed east for “The Florida Project” (2017), set in an Orlando day-rate motel where a woman sells sex to support herself and her daughter. Then he's back out west, in Texas City, with “Red Rocket” (2021), about a sleazy former porn star—a raunchy gigolo—in search of fresh, edgy mischief.

All this cross-country zigzagging, which may once have seemed arbitrary and rootless, has over time seemed more purposeful and even political. By focusing on a broad cross-section of sex workers and their harsh realities – odd hours, difficult conditions, treacherous pimps, hostile johns, nonexistent benefits, dressing-room squabbles, porn-set performance anxiety – Baker makes the case in movie after movie. , that there is no harder, more resourceful and more cruelly stigmatized labor force under the sun. “Anora,” set over several winter days and nights in New York, brilliantly renews this argument, even if the sun itself, such a bright fixture in Baker's earlier work, is on hiatus. Photographer Drew Daniels finds a forlorn beauty in the gray skies of Coney Island, where visitors shiver along the boardwalk, and in the heavy snow that blankets a nearby area, in a late, picturesque scene. Fortunately, the film has its own built-in heat supply.

Anora—who goes by Annie, and is brilliantly played by Mickey Madison—is a twenty-something exotic dancer at HQ, a Manhattan strip club. The movie opens with Ani and her colleagues at work, each pushing a customer into a chair. Take that “greatest day,” fills the air, the luscious, nocturnal melody of our life's romance. Men take it up in arms, but their lust is indulged as well as ridiculed; The camera, gliding matter-of-factly traverses rows of swaying hips and bouncing hips, easily a manager taking inventory.

Annie is one of the best girls in HQ, and Madison plays her with a wicked swagger and a disarming smile that stretches a mile under the neon lights. Watch and listen as Oni tricks a patron out of his shell; Hearing that she has no bills to keep in her thong, he jokingly offers to take her to the ATM. She's so good at her job that the movie reminds us that it's actually a chore and tiring: Cut to the next morning, Ani, Shade and a Wearing a heavy jacket, he returned to his Brooklyn apartment in settled silence, crawled under the covers and recharged for another long night ahead.

No wonder the rest of “Anora” plays like a wild dream—at first exhilarating, then cataclysmic and always terribly unpredictable. Back at headquarters, Ani is recruited by Ivan Zakharov (Mark Eidelstein), a carefree young pleasure seeker from Russia. Ani is Uzbek American, and although her Russian is serviceable at best, her body language is fluent enough for both of them. Ivan, for his part, knows enough English to mutter “God bless America” ​​as Ani slides onto his crotch. He is rich enough to take their relationship personal. Before long, Annie is visiting him at her parents' mansion in Brighton Beach, which has stunning waterfront views and daily maid service. Who exactly is this privileged little mophead? And who and where are the parents?

The answers, like most things involving the Russian oligarchical class, are good for no one. Eydelshteyn, a very flamboyant clown, portrays Ivan as a foolboy. When he first pays Annie for sex — he finishes so quickly he doesn't bother to remove his socks — you want him to run with the money. But the relationship progresses, even if it never deepens. Annie isn't dumb, and Madison, whose sad eyes often tell a story her smile doesn't, betrays a silent awareness that something here is too good to be true. Still, Ani is young and, if not quite in love, eager to believe in love. She can't resist Evan's horndog enthusiasm, his party-hearty vibes, his vulgar luck. Within days, the two jet off to Vegas on a private plane, get hitched, then return to New York to start their new lives. It was over before it started.

Baker conceived the role of Annie with Mikey Madison in mind, mainly inspired by her work on “Once Upon a Time”. . . Hollywood” (2019) and “Scream” (2022). In each of those films, you may recall with alarm, Madison's character dies horribly, covered in blood, on fire and screaming in agony. Mercifully, Oni avoids such a fate, However, he is bound, held, and screamed for bloody murder. His opponents are a swashbuckling trio, drawn with a keen eye on Brighton Beach's immigrant population: two Armenian Americans, Toros (Karen Karagulyan) and Garnik (Vache Tovmasian), and A Russian, Igor (Yura Borisov). The men work for Ivan's parents, and when they catch word that the boy has tied the knot with “a whore,” they must call off the wedding. And Ani sent packing.

Easier said than done. The centerpiece of “Anora” is an intensely electric sequence—nearly half an hour of whirlwind nose-breaking, furniture-destroying mayhem—where you can feel not only the narrative pounding but the very foundations of the genre shifting beneath the characters' feet. Fun game in progress; Pratfall Vibes is part Three Stooges, part “After Hours”. It was certainly this sequence that led Cannes jury president Greta Gerwig to summon Howard Hawks and Ernst Lubitsch. I think “Anora” could be Baker's “Trouble in Heaven,” if you can imagine Mary Hopkins kicking Herbert Marshall in the face. But would it be more or less pejorative to call Preston Sturges the most class-conscious and marriage-minded of screwball auteurs? Like Sturges, Baker understands how the clashing priorities of love, sex, money and status can send a passionate romance into marital chaos.

A contemporary return to the screwball tradition is a welcome but challenging proposition, and Baker's play with form is hardly limitless. If you see “Anora” in a clean house, listen carefully to the laughter of the audience when all hell finally breaks loose: is it haughty or nervous? Does it arise in response to or despite the brutal abuse on display? There are no wrong answers. While setting his characters on a violent collision course, Baker seems to lean toward realism, humanism, comedy, and action beyond the point of formal conformity. Through it all, I think, he is trying to negotiate an honest path for his diminutive but vulnerable heroine. He doesn't want to soft-pedal the danger someone like Ani might find himself in, but at the same time he wants to make her more of an agent than a victim of chaos. This is why his physical control, evident from the first strip-club scene, extends satisfactorily to the art of self-defense. There's an ugly subgenre of crime movies that “Anora” acknowledges through rejection: the kind where a female sex worker stumbles onto a slab.

When Ivan takes a cowardly flight, the film becomes more ambitious and unrelenting, transforming into a car chase thriller, with three men on a reckless chase and a depressed, half-disciplined Ani. Manhunt has its monotonous moments, but it's also where the action comes into moral focus. The movie, building up a righteous steam of indignation, now turns it against the Ivans of the world and salutes those who toil thanklessly at their jobs. That's why Becker dwells thoughtfully on the women who come home every morning to clean up Ivan's mess—and on the belligerent tow-truck driver who comes to interrupt the plot but emerges within seconds, as a disturbing kindred spirit. At its most comical, even Toros is shown working overtime: by day, he's a priest.

This kind of multitasking is a constant in the director's cinematic universe, which, given its devotion to exploring America's various armpits, we might as well call Bakersfield. And so it is that “Anora,” a slice of life and a virtuoso farce, unfolds itself in the final stretch like a cracked fairy tale. Annie is a strip-club Cinderella, entwined with the frog among the princes, but is also given, to Igor, the improbable among the white knights. What passes between Ani and Igor—whom Borisov plays with just enough cool to temper this movie's nightmarish chaos—is a rare and complex moment of grace, a connection that goes beyond mere transaction. You want it to last forever; You know it won't. For both Ani and Igor, it's back to the grind. ♦