There’s a piece of trivia on IMDb I find perplexing.

Said to be following wealthy people, a first for director Sean Baker.

Where did this trivia come from? It is not about wealthy people. It’s about normal people getting caught in the glamorous and superficial lives of the rich. This is Sean Baker doing what he does so well. Now he just has a bigger budget which enables him to look at the lives of the working poor in a context he couldn’t before. There is a difference here: There is a promise of escape, even if we, as the audience, know from the start that this just can’t end well.

Anora, who prefers Ani, so maybe I should use that as well, is a sex worker who has Russian roots, so she knows Russian, which gives her an opportunity to meet Ivan or Vanya, a son of Russian oligarch, at a stripclub she works at. This is a start of a business relationship, which turns into marriage soon after.

Before I go into spoiler territory, here’s some thoughts in general regarding this movie. The relationship never really moves outside of the business. Ani is an accessory to Ivan. She becomes mostly a passive participant in his life and at best she can be an active agent in her life when she is servicing his sexual needs. Otherwise he doesn’t really pay her attention. You can argue that this is a step up from her job as a stripper and an escort, but at the same time she is being isolated from her own support net. They don’t meet with her friends or relatives at any point and she isn’t making money as she is now playing the part of a partying wife to a man younger and definitely less responsible than her.

This is a great addition to the filmography of Baker, who has always been very consistent in both the quality of the movie and his advocacy of both sex work and sex workers (despite pointing out the exploitative nature of it in both directions), which is nice coming from someone on the cusp of being an actual recognizable mainstream director. While his themes repeat, he always finds new ways and points of view of exploring those themes. There’s a reason why so many people cite him as one of their favorite directors working today.

This is a pretty meaningless sidenote, but I wanted to bring this up: In general, I hate the shouting over each other in movies. Sure, it might be realistic, but that doesn’t mean that it makes a movie better. Here, Baker manages to pull back just enough on that to keep this movie working. This has a lot to do with the characters being believable and sympathetic even when they are doing a shitty thing. We know that they are forced to do that, except for the very top.

A more important sidenote: Again, from the IMDb trivia: they did not use intimacy coordinators. Well, this is bad, but the trivia misses some context. Baker himself has said that he asked the actors whether they wanted one and they declined. I am of two minds on this. It is good that he asked, but he is still the director and a producer on the movie, so he has power. Part of the job of the intimacy coordinator is to make sure the actors are not pressured into anything and not having one removes an important guardrail. My inclination is to trust Baker on these kinds of things, but then again, I don’t know him and my inclination would have been to trust Gaiman as well…

Anyhow, let’s get into the spoilers.

So, Igor… At first I wondered where I had seen this guy before and of course IMDb told me he was in a Finnish movie called Compartment No. 6 (Hytti nro 6, a very good movie, by the way).

Igor is thug, but since this is a Baker movie, it isn’t quite that simple.

Igor works with Garnick who in turn works for Toros, a man responsible for looking after Vanya. When they hear rumors of Vanya having been married, they need to deal with the situation. However, when they arrive at the house, Vanya escapes leaving Ani behind with this threesome of criminals. After an altercation, they come to an agreement that they need to find Vanya to be able to annul the marriage before Vanya’s parents arrive from Russia to take Vanya with them. So, they spend most of the night running around town trying to find Vanya, who is dodging their attempts to contact him. While their attempts prove fruitless, they do form a kind of bond. They are in this together. They have all been put into this position because rich people don’t give a fuck about them or their well-being.

And the rich folk are as miserable. They have all the resources any human could ever need or want and yet they are making themselves miserable by putting pressures and expectations on themselves and then outsourcing those to keep everyone else down as well.

But Igor, who seems kind of slow, kind of understands all of this. He isn’t eager to smash an ice cream shop, but he does it, because it shis job. Same with restraining Ani when she tries to attack them. Igor goes with the flow, but we also get subtle hints that he is kind of on Ani’s side from the beginning. He tries to establish a connection even while the his bosses and Vanya are arguing about the situation.

In the end Ani’s dream marriage comes to an abrupt end. She can’t even hold onto the dream of Vanya pining for her as he tells right to her face that this was the way it was always going to end. To him she was just a distraction. Someone fun to have around. Not an actual person.

Sure, this is an unfortunate and traumatic experience for her, but it is to her advantage that all of this ended now rather than later. At least now she has a better chance of building a life for her and find someone who values her as a person rather than a possession.