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 This outdated fantasy has cropped up in numerous iconic on-screen love stories, whether it’s Disney’s Cinderella, any Jane Austen adaptation, the 1954 Audrey Hepburn film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.
Augusta Quirk/Universal
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.
