As someone who worked as an exotic dancer, I’m a harsh critic when it comes to cinematic strip fare, with my own particular set of credibility metrics. Is Magic Mike trying to finance a business with stacks of money lying in rubber? Check. “Closer” by Nine Inch Nails in a pivotal dance scene from Magic Mike XXL continuation? Check. Baroque manicure in Zola? (Check the nails.) Check. Nomi Malone licks the stripper pole inside Showgirls? Two thumbs with acrylic tips down. Yes. Never in a million years.

Now comes writer-director Sean Baker Anoriin which Mikey Madison plays Anora, or Ani as she prefers to be called, a stripper and sex worker from Brooklyn who tangles with Ivan, an adorably capricious man-baby – played to petulant perfection by Mark Eydelshteyn – who he happens to be the son of a Russian oligarch. Ani and Ivan meet at the strip club where they dance. A deal is struck between them (her time for his money) and mischief ensues. Presented as a kind of Cinderella story, Anoriits cinematic progenitor not so much Pretty woman like Tony Scott’s True romance crossed with that of Martin Scorsese After hours — a Roman drama depicted with gruesome punches and touches.

Before the film’s nationwide release, I was cynical about it Wins Palme D’Or at Cannes, 98% Rotten Tomatoes ratingand Oscar noise. Another guy author trying to focus on faith in sex work (see also: Striptease, exotic)? Try me bro. But from a first shot inside the club, where Ani is hard at work on what looks like a lap-dance assembly line, I could tell that Baker was stuck: the social dynamics of the strip club and labor issues, the aesthetic stripper and slang, all deftly handled. He nailed every detail, from Ania’s patient smile to her micro thong. And Madison put me to one word: Not.

As the film begins, we see Ani smoothly navigating the waters of the crowded club, looking for customers interested in a lap dance or two or 12. She has a few hits, but what got me was the miss — when a customer rejects her offer for a dance, Ani raises her eyebrows and says “Huh?” The fluctuating speech of “no,” the feminine deference that is also a challenge for the man to reconsider, unlocked a core sense memory deep in my reclusive hustler bones. I have said – and embodied – that “no” thousands of times.

In the first few minutes, Ani brilliantly fends off the customers’ creepy questions. She’s sweet, playful, determined, her practiced flirting and fluid moves showing the mark of a true pro, from pole work to classic strip-teer. When the manager calls Ani to dance for a client (Ivan the Fate-bent), who has asked for a Russian-speaking girl, she is in the dressing room eating the food she brought from home. (Some viewers thought of this trivial detail: Strippers eat out of Tupperware! They’re just like us!)

From this point on, you root it. Striptease-movie grumpy me cheering her on… until we see Ani in the private room with Ivan, giving him a lap dance while chewing gum. In far too many Hollywood representations sex workersgum is used as a lowbrow signifier: “Look at this floozy showing us her animal nature by chewing it. gum.” We get it: with jangling jaws and bubbles, gum represents a departure from bourgeois behavior. But in real life, the most demanding club managers don’t want you chewing gum when you’re on the floor: A) they think it’s “not classy” and B) they don’t want your Doublemint stuck in your precious beer. -soaked carpet that glows in the dark. That said, I remembered that Ani had just eaten and probably wanted to make sure she had fresh breath. Proforma stripper hygiene. All is forgiven.

After Ivan convinces Ani to see him after work, she shows up at his gaudy waterfront mansion the next day wearing eye bags and a bandage dress that reveals some leg bruises. Here’s where I gave up all my respect: even with top makeup artists on hand to do a cover-up job, Baker knew that to keep it real, Ani’s body would have to bear these marks – kisses. , party bumps, you name it — on her legs and hips. By consulting with working strippers and hiring them as actors in the production, Baker showed that his attention to authenticity was his bond. This little detail proves it. (To illustrate how that dedication was received, at a special screening of the film for sex workers in September, dancers in the audience they clinked their Pleaser heels together in appreciation.)

Anori it’s about class, about loyalty, and above all, about two young men testing the limits of the forms of power that have been allocated to them with money and a triad of thugs complicating things, sometimes hilariously. When Ivan’s family finds out he and Ani got married during a whirlwind trip to Las Vegas, they demand an annulment. A sex worker wife for their failure? God, no! What felt like a Cinderella story at first is exposed as a Faustian affair with a sable coat thrown in.

By the time the story moves away from the club, authenticity is less about the granular details of sex-work and more about the glaring disparities between the “haves” and the “have-nots,” the haves being able to run away (literally ) of their problems, and those who don’t have the task of either cleaning (and literally) or following them. Bolstered by wealth and connections, Ivan can easily move on. But what about Ani?

Stigma is the silent third party in the relationship. Strippers do not often deal directly with criminalization, but the stigma can make many practical concerns treacherous, such as banking, housing, direct employment, and child custody. Any stripper knows better than to try to secure an apartment or bank loan with “stripper” written in the occupation box on the application. What is at stake is not just social capital, but your fundamental legitimacy as a citizen, a state that can leave one feeling at least vulnerable and at worst trapped. No wonder the fantasy of rising above all this by marrying Ivan – a unicorn client who is young, handsome, rich, gregarious and spontaneous – would beckon her to the otherwise pragmatic Ani.

In Baker’s Palme d’Or acceptance speech, took the opportunity to talk about de-stigmatizing sex work. He dedicated the award to “all sex workers, past, present and future”. a refreshing tribute after decades of directors and actors racking up racks of awards from sex worker stories without any recognition. (Fun fact: The first Academy Award for Best Actress was awarded in 1928 to Janet Gaynor for her performance in three films, including The street angelin which she played a working girl.) Does Sean Baker make any kind of voice for sex workers? Emphatically, no. But he’s an ally, saying the work — always controversial, sometimes messy and never easy — is legitimate. Aspirational? Not for most. But real.

Sex work as a proxy for consumerism, achieving the American Dream, and/or working under capitalism are tropes that, like a fictional stripper’s gum, are stretched pretty thin so far: “We’re all prostitutes/ Each one has their price” is a line from -a song (“We Are All Prostitutes”) by Pop Group that appeared in 1979, for God’s sake. My sense is that people enamored with this Marxist analysis enjoy the rush of feeling like a cheeky provocateur without paying any real price for the transgression. They all talk. No walking. In PR breaks and interviews, Baker and her cast at least nod to the fact that the stakes are different in being a stripper than writing a movie about, or playing, a stripper.

Critics have been kind to indie king Baker, whose opera includes several films in which sex work, of one kind or another, is central. As some have noted, the current focus strikes a strange moralizing sound in me – what about this — but so far, the work seems more honest than sensationalist. Can’t fault him, really. Sex work is a colorful world – no less so than the most trafficked thematic grounds of crime and combat.

As a stripper, I’m so used to being picked on and judged in the club and petitioning for understanding, for any shred of respect, outside of it. This time, I am an arbiter of legitimacy. I can pick and choose, give the coin of admiration and approval as I please. In the yard participation, validation and, I’ll go so far as to say it, pixy of sex workers, Baker has made not just an engaging film, but a paradigm-shifting one. Good thing that for a change, the evaluation is mutual. Who could say no to that?