“Anora”: The Academy Praising Soft-Porn Again
The drama directed by Sean Baker is a perfect display of the entertainment industry’s fixation with explicit content.

Summary
Anora, a young sex worker from Brooklyn, gets a life-changing opportunity when she is proposed to by the son of a Russian oligarch. However, as soon as the news reaches the family of the groom, the parents will do whatever is necessary to obtain an annulment.
Hollywood’s Other Favorite
Even though these past few weeks most of the attention has been focused on the industry’s current sweetheart (an audience’s current foe), Emilia Perez, with hilarious results, I haven’t forgotten about the other project Tinseltown is trying to pass as a “little jewel.” Of course, I’m speaking about Anora.
Ever since its release at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2024, Anora has received non-stop praise. I remember searching for Award Seasons’s favorites back in September, when the project hadn’t even been released in the U.S., and some critics were already posing Anora as one of the strongest contenders to the Oscars. I’ve said before that I believe the audience at Cannes would give standing ovations to anything. And reading the few details about the plot that were online at the time, I had strong suspicions of what I was going to watch.
I was not wrong.
A Short Fantasy of a Better Life
Anora “Ani” Mikheeva is a young woman who is a “sex worker” (a fancy way to say “prostitute”) in a Brooklyn strip club.
One night, her boss introduces Ani to Vanya, the son of a Russian oligarch. She understands some Russian, and so she is the only one who would be able to communicate with him. Funnily enough, later in the movie, Vanya has no problem speaking English.

The guy likes Ani, and starts to pay her to provide her services in his house, and to keep him company during his parties and trips. Vanya’s only issue is that he lives off his parents’ money, and they want him to come back to Russia. To avoid this, he talks Ani into marrying him so he can get a green card.
And of course, when Vanya’s family finds out he is married to a prostitute, they go after the couple to force them to get an annulment. Vanya runs away, leaving Ani in the hands of a group of Russian men (including his father), who drive her around, visiting all the places the “husband” could be at. I guess that “road trip” is supposed to be the “comedic” part of the story.
After a very long and boring chase, Vanya is found, and to Ani’s disappointment, he bends the knee and accepts to sign the annulment without a fight. The end.
What Makes Anora So Special?
That is what I’d love to know. I really don’t understand.
We’re talking about the type of story we’ve seen hundreds of times, the trope of a family trying to separate two young lovers, but there is no twist, nothing interesting that would justify making a new movie. That good old trope could be reused without much innovation and succeed if the film focused on a love story. But in Anora love is nowhere to be found.
Sean Baker tries to sell it as a drama with comedic moments, although the story could be described as anything but funny. In fact, it’s very hard to classify it in any genre, because there is almost no plot, and events happen one after another for no reason.
Sex and Nudity: The Real Protagonist
These past years, I have witnessed the industry’s obsession with sex-related content. If your film has very explicit scenes, your chances to have award nominations of all kinds double. That would explain the overwhelming success of Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things in award ceremonies last year.

While Anora is not even half as creepy and perverse, the sexual scenes are everywhere. In fact, one of the first things we see on screen at the beginning of the movie is the protagonist’s naked body, while she tends to one of her clients. The focus is on sexualizing the actress as much as possible, in a very unsubtle and classless way.
Anora is the plainest, most boring protagonist I’ve seen in a while. We know nothing about her, save that she sleeps with people for a living. Given this is such a huge part of the film, I was confident that there was going to be more context for that. How did Ani get to do that job? Why is she doing it? Where is her family, aside from that sister that lives with her? Why is she doing that job and not something else?
Sex Work is Not Empowerment
The protagonist never expresses any discomfort with her current lifestyle. She does not seem to be doing it to survive, because she cannot find another job or because she needs fast money. For all we know, she enjoys it. This push to “remove the stigma” from sex work and show it as a movement of empowerment for women is disgusting. If you remember, the same thing was made in Poor Things, where Bella gets a job in a brothel, and the film presents it as an “educational experience”. But I digress.

With such a lack of information on Ani’s motivations, her relationship with Vanya and her reactions to everything that happens after are confusing. For starters, it’s not clear to me why the protagonist, who is smarter than Vanya, consents to marry him just like that. She does not seem particularly interested in money, nor does she appear to be in love with him. The marriage is something transactional, done in haste, to defy the parents.
What can she possibly win from that? Why not just take the money and sign the annulment? She wants to be part of a family, maybe? It’s extremely difficult to care for a character that behaves randomly, and in the case of a main one, it renders the project an incoherent waste of time. The “emotional” ending left me scratching my head. She thought Vanya was in love with her, or was she just tired from the road trip? I don’t understand.
Mikey Madison as Anora
Mikey Madison’s performance has earned her the label of “revelation” in the press. For her breakthrough role, she spends several scenes fully or partially naked, performing sexual acts, and swearing repeatedly.

Nudity and sexualization are in this day and age the only way to get noticed in Hollywood, and it makes me sad for young actresses like Madison, who is only twenty-five, to obtain recognition for a project like this one.
She does not seem to be a bad actress. In the few scenes where she is not having sex or swearing, as brief as they are, I saw more acting range than in many of the trendy young actors of the moment. Maybe with a decent script, she could do great things. But roles such as this don’t allow her to showcase her capacity.
Critical Response and Box Office Results
For what I could see online, Anora had a production budget of $6.000.000. So far, the global box office results amount to $31.978.115, more than enough for a small film.
I don’t recommend this film; I suppose you have expected as much. It’s pointless, too long, and unnecessarily explicit. Some might praise the direction or some technical aspects, but personally, I’m sick of giving a pass to films that border on pornography. I’m sick of paying a ticket to get flashed. If explicit images are more relevant than the plot, it’s a no for me.