Anora doesn’t deserve the Palme d’Or, but Sean Baker does

After a 13-year drought, the Palme d’Or has finally gone to an American film again: Anora, the eighth feature by director Sean Baker.

It is not the highest-rated Palme d'Or winner in recent years. But it is, without a doubt, one of the most commercial films which won the grand prize at Cannes. Although the film was approved by this year’s jury, its reputation was already polarized during its Cannes premiere. Viewers with a populist taste mostly enjoyed this vibrant genre piece, while those looking at it from an auteur perspective were more ambivalent—some even considered it among Baker’s weaker works.

Both opinions hold some merit, but for a Cannes competition line-up in which roughly a third of the films have been badly rated, the ultimate win for Anora isn’t exactly shocking.

So, what are the reasons to dislike Anora?

Words like shallow, loud, and vulgar dominate critiques from those unimpressed. Obviously, if you come to Anora expecting an art-house movie, you’ll be startled by its garish color palette, pumping EDM, and rowdy protagonists. This isn’t a film that strives for refined taste, nor does it employ any “highbrow” cinematic techniques.

But that’s precisely the world Sean Baker has always depicted. Fundamentally, this world is extremely American. Baker’s films consistently revolve around America’s lower strata. In his earlier works, he focused on undocumented immigrants. In more recent years, he’s zeroed in on different corners of sex-worker communities (Tangerine with transgender sex workers, The Florida Project with an online sex ad prostitute, Red Rocket with an ex-porn actor, and now a stripper/escort in Anora).

Whether we’re talking about economics or lifestyle, these communities lay bare the rawest “Americanness”—their economic transactions need no mention, while their cultural surface is as shallow, overt, and raucous as any cliché of the U.S. And yet they also throb with a vibrant life force, which in itself is extremely American. That’s where Baker’s films derive their perpetual energy.

Still, Baker’s films aren’t satisfied with just serving up surface-level spectacle. His work typically has a heartbeat of empathy and can be genuinely moving. Because what truly concerns him isn’t the glitzy surface—rather, it is the emptiness and sorrow that lies behind that surface. His bottom-rung protagonists throw themselves into the fray, always seeking confrontation, but they’re doomed to fight battles they can never win—if they were savvier, they’d have realized that from the start. Hence, when they inevitably lose, they end up in dire straits, yet there’s always enough human warmth for them to press on.

Those features describe Baker’s best films (e.g., Tangerine and The Florida Project), but they can also apply to Anora. On the surface, Anora is a worldly story about a gold-digger hooking a wealthy young Russian “heir,” but at heart, it’s about a physical laborer blindly believing in a better life: She’s so optimistic about the “as long as you hustle, you can succeed” American Dream that she can’t see how absurd the marriage she’s chasing truly is. That’s Anora’s tragedy, as well as Baker’s intended tragedy—depicting the situation through boisterous comedic plot twists and candy-colored visuals.

Anora is a stripper. At her club, she meets Ivan, the son of a Russian oligarch studying in the States. After a few rounds of transactional fun, Ivan proposes during a trip to Las Vegas, and they marry on the spot, returning to New York to settle into “married life.” But their honeymoon phase barely lasts the length of a short video game. When Ivan’s parents get wind of what’s happened, they dispatch bodyguards to control the situation, then fly in themselves to ensure the marriage is voided. Ivan flees without a fight, leaving Anora on her own to cope with his bodyguards and parents in a futile attempt to hold onto the marriage.

But Sean Baker doesn’t particularly care about a fairy-tale story. The sweet romance between Ivan and Anora takes up about a third of the film’s runtime and feels mechanical: The editing is rushed, the storytelling unsubtle, whereas the aftermath—what the housekeepers must clear after Ivan’s party—makes a far deeper impression. Once the fairy tale cracks, and Anora and the bodyguards begin their quest to find Ivan, the film finally hits that signature Baker vibe: As night falls, all sorts of urban subcultures come alive again. While everyone’s racing to complete the main storyline, a tangle of chance encounters emerges.

In the end, the night is over, and dawn breaks; under the sun, the American Dream’s bleak backside can be seen in all its nakedness. The stripper’s Cinderella wish collapses in the face of reality. In the snow, her kindred, socioeconomically similar folks give her understanding, affection, and warmth, but she can’t accept it; to accept it would mean conceding that she’s lost at the game of American capitalism. The film ends with the repeated sound of windshield wipers, like a knock at the door over and over, offering no promise of salvation.

Still, Anora continues Baker’s anthropological interest and empathy for society’s lower depths. But it also displays some obvious flaws. Its story depends too heavily on genre conventions, which stifles the quirks that would otherwise come from the personalities of nonprofessional actors in Baker’s earlier films. There’s something overly single-minded about Anora, charging full tilt and never looking back, which undercuts the film’s sense of nuance.

Even so, it’s a logical progression for Baker’s career—and a moment of commercial triumph for a filmmaker who’s long tried to charm mainstream audiences but was previously limited by budget and subject matter. I’m not sure if Anora truly deserved its Palme d’Or, but I do think Baker deserves the honor. If this accolade can serve as a key that unlocks the door for more people to explore Baker’s other films, so much the better. One can only hope that with this mainstream success, he doesn’t lose that underground grit that’s always made him unique.