Anora-Sean Baker

I've never been a big fan of strip clubs.

This, having said, after possessing the privilege in my late teens/early twenties of bypassing entry fees—and enjoying a multitude of other privileges forbidden to average Joe customers—at the now defunct Platinum Horse on BrookPark Road.

One of my best friends (to this day) who shunned the conventional job market in favor of more extravagant endeavors worked as a doorman (as well as many other faculties) at this skin joint and oftentimes, when searching for some sort of activity to fill the void of ample time and desultory activities that come with those intermediary years of adulthood before you turn 21, I would stop up at the Platinum Horse to hang for a chat while enjoying free views in the process.

Many times, after their shift was over at 2:30 AM, I would tag along with my friend and the crew from the club across the street to Bob's Big Boy for a late-night breakfast.

It was there that the veil was pulled back from the performer and their true self became revealed. Bouncers commiserated over cups of coffee and bacon about getting their hands dirty with tossing out drunken frat boys who couldn't keep their hands to themselves and dancers would engage in pissing contests over jewelry and wads of cash that marks would shower them with, all the while ridiculing the very source of their income behind their backs.

One time I spotted a lonely bowler from one of the many leagues I was in at the club and he seemed very jovial and happy when he saw me between lap dances. I noticed that he seemed to be glued with attention to one of the girls in particular and the mismatch of the two were seated in a booth for the duration of the night. The same girl was out to breakfast with us one night and, knowing she wouldn't be shy about the guy, I casually mentioned seeing her with him and slipped in the fact that he was in multiple leagues with me.

"Oh yeah, Joe Shmo? That's my house payment."

"Huh? What do you mean by house payment?"

"He's been paying the mortgage on my house for the past two years. And this Louis Vuitton came from him too." She said as she plopped a shiny bag onto the table.

"Get the fuck out of here! He got that for you too!?" One of the other girls hissed incredulously (absent of malice).

"Yep. He told me he took out a loan from the bank too and told them it was to remodel his kitchen, but then whispered that it was to finance our 'relationship'." She twin quoted with manicured index and middle fingers while giggling. An eruption of laughter and screams from all the girls followed.

"You lucky cunt!" One of the others screamed. Customers jerked their heads in our direction. Wide-eyed and slightly embarrassed, I sunk my head beneath my shoulders while looking up at my buddy. He just grinned back at me with a slight shrug as if to say "What can you do?" Meanwhile, the girls continued laughing and trading stories completely oblivious to the rest of the restaurants' crowd. It was three in the morning at a Big Boy's, so, in hindsight, what else would people expect?

This was only one of many nights that could interchangeably be replaced by a multitude of others I had spent with that crew.

*In 2005, after my friend had left the strip club game and gone off to California to attend film school, he had flown back with a few of his classmates, and on a Sunday afternoon, we shot a professional movie trailer for a film he was hoping to get financing for.*

Perhaps this is only a common symptom of the service industry and is only natural to regal customers to their faces while slandering them as ignorant fools behind their backs over food and cocktails.

*I know I did this constantly over my thirteen years in the gaming industry and in Broad Street Tully, Sui's honest reduction of the guests and poor attitude is admittedly an internal reflection of my views toward the specimens that oozed their way through casino doors.*

Through both the video shoot and after-hours mingling I noticed that girls would bounce from one relationship to another almost every week and were very open to groping anyone at the table (ANYONE) and casually french kissed their bouncers and managers as if they were hugging them. A lot of them would get plastered while on the job and there was a fair share of cat-fighting and slander. A lot. The tether of low self-esteem bonded them together and I noticed that they talked down about themselves quite a bit, and when they weren't making a spectacle of self-eviscerating tears they were trashing their mark customers.

One tough industry.

Having been made privy to how these women genuinely felt about the men who paid them to get naked and pretend to care about their feelings and be attracted to them, I harvested very little urge to ever want to go to the strip club or become a regular.

As a matter of fact, since turning 18 and being eligible to go to the strip club, I can count of maybe 15 times total (including bachelor parties and entertaining friends from out of town) that I've voluntarily walked through the doors of a strip club. And, should grand opulence ever find its way into my life, I find it hard to picture myself bouncing from club to club to make it rain.

The sour attitude of strippers towards the fools that invest money into the apparition of someone they can't touch while acting as their friend that, out of earshot, regards them only as cash machines with a non-electric pulse, served as the influence to another character in Broad Street Tully, the illustrious Star/Jessy Redford. And left me with a scarred impression of the workforce as a whole, which robs me of any genuine enjoyment when I (soberly) tag along into strip clubs.

So far as how all of this plays into the film Anora, it leads me to believe that this was a well-researched film, as they pretty much got the accuracy of that life to a T.

The catty fighting amongst co-workers, shallow personality of Anora/Ani, and caricature of the general customer seems to have changed little from how it was 20+ years ago. The glossy mascara and eye shadow plastered backstage serve as an appropriate facade for Ani and her cohorts as they enter the floor and cast lines for the biggest fish whose wallet size (hopefully) rivals their malleable personality.

Ani lands such a mark in obnoxious oligarch heir Vanya and he proposes obscene amounts of cash for Ani to come over the following day and be his escort. Upon entering an opulent mansion, Ani seeks to prolong their relationship beyond the casual fling and wedges herself into his wealth whenever a window presents itself. Vanya, with an endless reservoir of funds at his disposal, cares nothing about the transparent personality of Ani and placates her with cash at her every request and receives copious amounts of sexual benefits and companionship in return.

Eventually, his haphazard habits trip over into the realm of reality where his parents have to maintain positive imagery as prominent oligarchs in Russia, and after Vanya and Ani get married in Vegas the inevitable consequences follow.

What transpires from this point forward I can only describe as both scattered and formulaic. It is formulaic in that you as the viewer know that Ani and Vanya's world will eventually come crashing down but then is also scattered as, unfortunately, the remaining 60% of the film is an overly-centered search for Vanya as he disappears on a rogue bender and Ani and Russian henchmen attempt to futilely track him down.

The first half of this movie wasn't too bad, and as a champion of verisimilitude I rather enjoyed the character development and no punches pulled approach to depicting the exotic dancing world as it existed yesterday, tomorrow, and probably forevermore. But once the home invasion scene commenced this whole saga took a nose-dive and reminded me of another trainwreck attempt at realism, the Safdie Brothers Good Time.

The dialogue was garbage, scenarios laughably unrealistic, scenes arduously stretched beyond the point of taut, and character development practically shoved into a garbage disposal. Vanya, his parents, and the henchmen felt like a goofy assortment of cookie-cutter Russians and by that point, the character of Ani had grown to become such a shallow gold-digging bitch that any modicum of sympathy for her plight had been exsanguinated and you didn't give a shit about what further avalanches of misfortune fell upon her head. For by that point, I felt as if she earned everything that had been served upon her plate.

Good half of a film, but as a whole this one sucked.

I tried Sean Baker's other film, The Florida Project—about a collection of deadbeat single mothers living off the dole in Orlando and rotating their time between television, vaping at the pool, and getting drunk at car rallies—and turned it off halfway it was so bad, and this one didn't hold much in terms of an upgrade.

Stars: *

Verdict: Pass

Cousins: The Wrestler, Leaving Las Vegas, The Rules of Attraction, Killing Zoe