“The ending almost redeems it.” So remarked my husband after sitting patiently through Anora—which swept this year’s Oscars with five wins, including Best Picture and Best Actress—about a young woman from Brighton Beach, the Russian section of Brooklyn, who works as a lap dancer in a Manhattan strip club. I agree, especially with the word “almost.”
The opening scene shows Anora “Ani” Mikheeva (Mikey Madison) plying her trade in an establishment upscale enough to have rules for its male customers. They are discouraged from touching the lap dancers, talking dirty to them, treating them like prostitutes, or interacting with them without plenty of cash. To the credit of writer-director Sean Baker, Anora does not sugarcoat the fact that only one of these rules—the last—gets enforced.
What Anora does not show is that the majority of lap dancers, pole dancers, and strippers are not employees but freelancers, whose sole income is the money they can extract from the customers. Nor does it show how large a cut is taken by the clubs in the form of house fees, rental fees for the requisite ten-inch platform shoes and bra-and-panty sets, payment for alcohol consumed on the job, and fines for being sick, late, or uncooperative. One former lap dancer put it this way in a 2007 interview: “From my very
