It seems stupid to have to say that Anora is not pornography or “just a stripper movie.” The lack of critical thinking involved in assessing Anora as porn or a stripper movie leaves me to three conclusions in the wake of the backlash of the film winning five Oscars (including Best Picture and Best Actress for Mikey Madison):
- If you are calling Anora porn, you have never viewed actual pornography. You know, where there is actual penetration and flying bodily fluids.
- If you are calling Anora a “stripper movie,” you are confusing the lead’s profession with the film’s greater themes. It’s a bit like saying Raging Bull is a boxing movie and ignoring the character study of Jake LaMotta’s self-loathing because he punched people in the face for a living in Scorsese’s masterpiece.
- My final thought is how many of the people who are trashing Anora actually saw it.
I don’t have a scientific study with a Venn diagram, but I suspect there’s considerable overlap.
At its core, Anora is a film about class and agency. Ani’s whirlwind romance with the seemingly filthy-rich Vanya, which leads to a hasty marriage, concerns two people at the opposite ends of the wealth spectrum. Ani works nights at a strip club and occasionally makes money on the side for escort services. We learn that she’s 23 in the movie, just naive enough to marry Vanya and believe her newfound good fortune is real.. It should also be stated that Ani is not a pure “gold digger.” She and Vanya genuinely like each other, but obviously, the stakes are much higher for him than for her.
The first half of Anora (Ani’s full name) is decidedly funny, energetic, and yes, sexy. Ani is having a good time with Vanya in and out of bed—there’s a weirdly sweet scene where she gives him a helpful lovemaking pointer (the 21-year-old Vanya is a bit of a…let’s call him a jackrabbit) while they are in the act.
As Ani, Mikey Madison carries the film on her tiny frame like a champ. She’s in practically every scene. For all the quality writing, directing, and editing Sean Baker lends the film, this movie only works if we believe in Ani. One of the film’s fascinating choices is not to have Ani behave like a victim of her circumstances. Yes, her job involves pleasing men with her mostly naked body, but it’s clear she’s gotten her head around it. If anything, Ani is more bothered by living with her sister than working at the club. A more straightforward way to put it is that she is not ashamed. Earlier, I referred to her as naive in thinking she would get a Pretty Woman ending, but you have to believe that Ani goes for it because she knows her body has a shelf-life as a financial asset. As Thom Yorke from Radiohead once sang, “Gravity always wins.” Ani may not have to worry about gravity at 23, but the clock will start ticking soon enough.
Ani is looking to escape her profession because it can’t go on forever. She’s having a great time with Vanya; if the marriage holds, she will have a much easier life. The thing is, Vanya has parents—Armenian oligarch parents who consider their son’s marriage to a stripper an embarrassment to their family. A family that I’m sure does more awful things before breakfast than Ani will do in her lifetime.
This is where agency enters the movie like a sock on the jaw. Ani’s obviously not on equal footing with the incredibly wealthy Vanya. But here’s the thing: while Vanya’s access to money and power will likely get him out of whatever jams his lack of maturity gets him into, the money and the power aren’t his. His parents control the strings, so when ruthless mom and dad come calling, he has no more defense against their demand for the marriage to be annulled than Ani does. The difference is that the stakes for Vanya and Ani are considerably different. Vanya is going to get screamed at by his parents, pulled out of the United States, and put to work in whatever seedy business his father is a part of.
Once the oligarch’s henchmen become involved, there are still moments of absurdist humor. However, the film turns increasingly darker, and for Ani, it becomes desperate, as she still hopes Vanya can convince his parents to let the marriage continue. Once the tough guys bust into Vanya’s massive home (again, not really his), Vanya runs. The remainder of the film involves Ani being dragged through New York by the oligarch’s lackeys to find Vanya and force the annulment.
On a critical level, Baker probably could have cut this extended sequence in half and still achieved what he wanted from the film’s genuinely powerful ending, but I see no need to digress into nitpicking.
Once the papers are finally signed, a very intoxicated Vanya gets on a plane to head back to mommy and daddy’s empire, and Ani gets into a car with the kindest of the toughs, Igor, who dragged her through the city and then all the way to Vegas (where Ani and Vanya got married). Igor is certainly no saint, but you can see the sympathy in his eyes as he understands that Ani’s fate is sealed. He’s as polite as possible, considering Ani kicks, bites, and resists Igor (played by the Oscar-nominated Yura Borisov) like a woman possessed. He even offers her a scarf to cover her neck when it gets cold. It’s a small act of generosity, but it speaks volumes to his level of empathy for a young woman he knows is not getting a fairytale ending.
Ani eventually reaches the same hopeless conclusion, and she breaks. And because of visualizing what she almost had, seeing a glimpse of the penthouse and then having the keys to the grand, oversized front door ripped from her clutches is nearly too much for her to bear. As the film comes to a close, Ani uses her only remaining power—her sexuality. Once the moment is over, she weeps. Now that she’s seen how the other 1% lives, she is left to return to a life that may not have been ideal before but looks far worse now.
The backlash against the film hasn’t been limited to its content. The revelation that the film’s studio NEON put $18 million into the film’s Oscar campaign (three times the film’s budget) has led to accusations that NEON “bought” the Oscar. A suggestion so ridiculous on its face that it’s hard not to respond to it without using harsh language. Let’s be clear, though: all Best Picture nominees have sizable Oscar campaign budgets. Anora’s budget only looks unusual when you compare it to the cost of the film’s production. That said, if you don’t think the other nine studios spent hefty amounts of cash on their nominees, you have no idea how this works. Wicked’s promotional budget was a record-setting $350 million on top of its $150 million production budget. That’s half a trillion dollars that went into that major studio production. Anora spent all of $24 million in total. NEON didn’t buy the Oscar; they just did a variation of what everyone else does.
The complaints about Anora’s campaign budget is just a cover for the final frontier of ridicule: slut shaming. The bulk of the hate the film is receiving may be coming primarily from those who see five to ten films a year (with The Rock probably being in one of them). Still, I’m sure some of it is coming from people who have watched porn, paid for sex, and have been faithful to their partner (“give or take a night or two”). So, the two camps fall into the ignorant and the disingenuous, and if we were to add a third, the jealous. It’s strange to be mad at Madison and Baker for winning awards someone else voted for them to receive. That is unless you think an indie director, a heretofore unknown actress, and an independent studio rigged the game with far fewer assets than most of their competition.
That’s not to say there aren’t people of good faith who simply wanted another film to win (I found myself rooting for Conclave, despite being an atheist). But people of good faith aren’t the ones behaving this way. They aren’t the problem.
There are two sides in Anora, the sex worker and the oligarch, and if you are so disgusted with Ani’s profession that you can’t see the film’s greater theme of class, then congratulations, you are on the side of the oligarch. This time, unlike the narrative outcome of Anora, the little person beat the big money. Feel free to soak in that irony.
