I hated Anora. But here’s why I’m wrong

This column contains spoilers for the movie, Anora.

The tickets had been sold out for weeks. Just an hour after Anora scooped the Academy Awards, a cinema in Brisbane’s Red Hill was filled with sex workers and friends celebrating International Sex Worker Rights Day. Then, the screening began.

Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn) and Anora (Mikey Madison) star in the movie.

Packed, says Elena Jeffreys, sex worker, PhD in the politics of sex work organisations and advocacy lead for Scarlet Alliance. She says the audience loved it.

Oh my god. I’d already been dressed down by my old friend, former sex worker and academic Eurydice Aroney, because I’d confessed to hating the film. Sure, it’s not my place to be a movie reviewer. But doing it anyway. You know when you read a bunch of reviews before you see a film - and then wonder if the reviewers saw what you did?

That was me when watching Anora, nicknamed Ani, a sex worker, and the situation in which she finds herself with the son of a Russian oligarch (message to the US: never trust Russians). Nearly every single review I read described it as liberating, as showing the collective strength of sex workers, and Anora herself as a woman possessed of enormous power.

Me? My god, I found Anora so depressing, so terribly depressing. Yes, the movie that won the Palme d’Or at Cannes last year and now has those five Academy Awards, including best picture, best director and best actress (for Mikey Madison’s work in the title role).

Nearly every single review described Anora as liberating, as showing the collective strength of sex workers, and Anora herself as a woman possessed of enormous power.Credit: AP

My friend Eury tells me off over my complete incapacity to see what she sees – a movie that is as close to reality for sex workers as possible. It lives and breathes the idea of “nothing about us without us” because both Sean Baker and Mikey Madison went all in. Baker thanked the sex worker community in one of his speeches on Monday (our time and also, as I said earlier, International Sex Worker Rights Day so very fitting). And Eury even mocks me for having enjoyed Pretty Woman all those years ago. Anora quotes PW but is nothing like it. Also, I suppose it is a character flaw that I want happy endings.

Why does Jeffreys love the film? Things that hadn’t even occurred to me, such as showing the strip club as a workplace where workers should have rights and protections.

Tilly Lawless, sex worker, writer, TED-talk giver, also tells me to pull myself together. She loved the film. “Funny and realistic ... lots of clients are man-children, and you can’t trust them to back you when push comes to shove”.

But she also gives me a bit of a lesson in film theory – Baker’s films are inspired by Italian neorealism. It shows the tragedy that capitalism makes of people’s lives.

I could not for the life of me find what the criteria are for Best Film on the Academy website. But I’m guessing entertaining is not one of them. The first bit is mildly funny. The rest is crushing. This is not because I find the concept of sex work itself demeaning. It’s existed for years. Sex work is work, as Jeffreys points out, and we should always consider ways to keep sex workers safe.

Sex workers are more likely to be targeted at work by perpetrators who think they will get away with that. The US audience sees the film in the context of a country where sex work is still criminalised (strange, considering how many politicians there seem to engage sex workers). In Australia, sex workers are safer because sex work is decriminalised (except in South Australia, Tasmania and Western Australia).

Globally, sex work isn’t safe. Sex workers are much more likely to be victims of sexual assault. In 2023, The Lancet Public Health said sex workers are also likely to be at greater risk for poor mental health, social exclusion, and violence. That includes murder.

“Faced with these health risks, there is a need to protect and support the health and lives of sex workers,” it said.

And as Carla Treloar, Scientia professor in the Centre for Social Research in Health at UNSW, when sex workers seek medical help, the fact that they are sex workers colours the entire experience.

“Everything is seen through that lens,” she says. It’s a layer of stigma, and their illnesses are inextricably tied to their work, even though the cause may be something entirely different.

After the Oscars, Sean Baker gave an interview where he said that his work tries to chip away at the stigma from which sex workers suffer.

“I think it should be decriminalised, and through my work, through humanising my characters … it will help do that.”

Ok. Fair enough exchange. I’ll never complain about Anora again.

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