At the 97th Oscars, Anora (2024) won five out of six awards the film was nominated for; Best Original Screenplay, Best Director, Best Editing, Best Actress in a Leading Role, and Best Picture. Director, writer, and editor Sean Baker won every award he was nominated for and Mikey Madison won her first Oscar award for Best Actress. Leading up to the ceremony, the film had become the clear front-runner to win Best Picture, predicted for the win by many.
Anora explores the life of New York City sex worker Ani (played by Madison), when she gets swept off her feet by Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), the son of a Russian oligarchic family. Confident Ani meets Ivan one night at the strip club she works at, because she understands and speaks Russian. He invites her to his house, eventually paying her $15,000 to spend a week as his, “horny American girlfriend.” They spend a whirlwind night in Las Vegas, eventually getting married in a classic Vegas wedding chapel. When Ivan’s parents find out he married a sex worker, they immediately fly from Russia to get the marriage annulled. While the first half of the film watches Ani fall in love with Ivan, partying and doing drugs, the second half of the film watches Ani fall into a crisis after Ivan runs away. Ani is left to track him down with his family’s hired goons who do not treat her well.
The film was released to rave reviews from critics, including praise of Anora’s star-making quality by Alissa Wilkinson with the New York Times. Anora won the Palme D’Ore at the Cannes Film Festival in May and was nominated for five Golden Globes, in addition to its six Oscars nominations.
It was also controversially received by the average viewer, especially the sex worker community. Baker’s work often focuses on marginalized communities, including Tangerine (2015) and Red Rocket (2021).Tangerine is about the life of a transgender sex worker while Red Rocket is about a former porn star. Both films faced similar criticisms to Anora. Yet, Baker has met with and interviewed sex workers over the years in his creation of these films. In fact, some of the actors in Anora, including some of the women playing Ani’s coworkers at the strip club, are played by women who have experience in sex work, inlcuding Luna Sofía Miranda and Lindsey Normington.
Both women spoke with the BBC about their experience on the film, highlighting that their ability to be involved brought a certain level of authenticity to the story— like a PDF of New York strip club slang shared with Madison— and that the film, “doesn’t go far enough on… the moral question around men who buy sex,” Edie Turquet, a background dancer in the film, said.
“It’s the question of consent. Most of these films shy away from answering it, or looking into it,” Miranda told the BBC, also frustrated that these women never exist outside of their profession.
But it’s the sex workers who weren’t involved in the making of the film who have taken to social media to share their thoughts and feelings. Los Angeles-based sex worker Marla Cruz wrote a review of the film for Angel Food Magazine: While the piece is worth a full read, Cruz criticizes the film for its stereotypical portrayal of sex work and recounted feelings of alarm bells while watching the film. Included in her review, Cruz shares some of her own experiences in the industry that gave her the negative feelings she included in the piece.
“[The film avoids] giving us a complex depiction of a sex worker,” Cruz writes. “Instead, Anora embodies the dehumanizing consumer fantasy of a devoted worker who loves the consumer so much she does not conceive of her servitude as labor.”
While the film is marketed as a dark romance with an infusion of comedy, from the experiences sex workers shared on the Internet, the film is more a horror film about what can go wrong— Ani throws away all protections she has from Ivan, allowing him to take advantage of her and get her wrapped up in his own immature rebellious phase. Ani leaves her job to marry a guy she just met. And he then screws her over by leaving her without looking back.
But the film also perpetuates stereotypes of sex workers as shallow party girls, rather than looking at anything about Ani’s past or desires. Instead, she’s dragged around a house by three men who have tied her up because she tried to fight back.
Yet, showing this— the vulnerability of this woman— is what some applauded the film for doing.
The highly-Oscar-awarded film is available now to stream on Disney+ and to rent or to buy from Apple TV and Amazon Prime: You can decide for yourself.
What's Your Reaction?
