What would Pretty Woman look like if it bore the smallest resemblance to the reality of sex work? Maybe something like this, Sean Baker’s amazing, full-throttle tragicomedy of romance, denial and betrayal. It’s a non-love story which finds its apex in a Las Vegas wedding chapel in the middle of the night and then, with a terrible inevitability, slaloms downwards into the most extraordinary, cacophonous uproar of recrimination unfolding in what is more or less real time. The hangover outlasts the party by many days.
The heroine is Anora, though she prefers Ani, a New York escort and table dancer played with vocal snap and physical grace by Mikey Madison (Manson groupie Susan “Sadie” Atkins in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood). One night, the club manager comes into the women’s dressing room and says a high-roller is out there, asking for a dancer who can speak Russian. Ani, who is from an Uzbek background and whose grandmother spoke Russian, volunteers.
