TWERKERS' COMP

Earlier this year, the Cannes Film Festival observed a heroic first: the director who won the Palme d'Or, the event's highest honor, dedicated the prize to "all sex workers, past, present, and future."

-  JUSTIN CHANG

No one familiar with the director, Sean Baker, could have been too surprised. Baker has spent his career-up to and including his Palme-laurelled latest, "Anora," a comedy about a Brooklyn stripper-chasing American hustlers of every stripe. He became an indie darling with "Starlet" (2012), a drama set in the industrial pornucopia of the San Fernando Valley, and "Tangerine" (2015), a Los Angeles-based buddy comedy about transgender sex workers. From there, Baker ventured east for "The Florida Project" (2017), set at an Orlando day-rate motel where a woman sells sex to support herself and her daughter. Then he veered west again, to Texas City, with "Red Rocket" (2021), about a flailing ex-porn star a prodigal gigolo-in search of fresh, frisky mischief.

All this cross-country zigzagging, which might have once felt arbitrary and rootless, has come to seem ever more purposeful and even political with time. In focussing on a broad swath of sex workers and their hardscrabble realities odd hours, gruelling conditions, treacherous pimps, hostile johns, nonexistent benefits, dressing-room squabbles, porn-set performance anxieties— Baker has made the case, in movie after movie, that there is no tougher, more resourceful, and more cruelly stigmatized labor force under the sun. "Anora," set over several wintry New York days and nights, splendidly renews this argument, even if the sun itself, such a glaring fixture of Baker's earlier work, is on hiatus. The cinematographer Drew Daniels finds a forlorn beauty in the gray skies over Coney Island, where visitors shiver along the boardwalk, and in the heavy snow that, in a late, lovely scene, blankets a nearby neighborhood. Fortunately, the movie has its own built-in heat supply.