Anora hits the tone just right on what it's really like to be a prostitute
When I was a daily newspaper reporter at the Alton Telegraph near St. Louis, one of my favorite assignments ever was a series I wrote in November and December 1997 on prostitution in that Mississippi River town.
In order to get the prostitutes’ stories, my editors gave me money to go and pay a good sampling of them. I probably interviewed a dozen and paid at least half of them for significant time to sit and chat … yes, I swear, that’s all it was! The stories were fascinating and almost completely heartbreaking and hopeless, with occasional flashes of hardened toughness, but mostly I sensed a likable sweetness and maybe even innocence (but mostly lack of education) beneath it all.
I think that’s why the highly-acclaimed 2024 film Anora spoke so realistically to me. I don’t know that it deserved five Academy Awards (best picture, director, actress (Mikey Madison), original screenplay, and film editing). But it is very entertaining and it also feels like the kind of film that doesn’t get made nearly often enough anymore. It’s grittily filmed and realistic.
I really didn’t see Madison winning that award against the powerhouse competition she faced. But I have been a big fan all through the years she played the oldest sister in Pamela Adlon and Louis C.K.’s excellent FX comedy TV series Better Things, which ran from 2016 to 2022. And how can you not appreciate that she paid her dues as Susan Atkins of the Charles Manson Family in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
In Anora, Madison plays a 23-year-old south Brooklyn stripper who meets a 21-year-old student named Vanya (played by Mark Eydelshteyn) who turns out to be the son of a Russian oligarch. With his parents half a world away, Vanya drinks, drugs, plays video games, and lounges in his mansion. He hires Anora to have some fun for a week and leave her depressing strip-club gig behind. Along the way, they make it to Las Vegas to get married. When Vanya’s parents get wind, they beeline for the States to retrieve Vanya, annul the marriage, and take him back to Russia. Anora, being the tough cookie that she is, does not make any of this easy for Vanya’s parents or the bumbling henchmen they have employed to help with the job.
The film jibes with what I witnessed firsthand on the streets and parks of Alton, Illinois. Those women I interviewed weren’t stereotypically downtrodden and looking for a way out. They felt, it appeared to me, much more like what I saw in Madison’s portrayal of Anora. She isn’t a hooker with a heart of gold—in fact, she’s often hardly likable. She doesn’t seem to want our sympathy and she may very well have a hard time eventually breaking away from the world’s oldest profession. She is entirely in control and in charge for much of the action. Only at the very end do we finally see that she might not truly be in total control when she finally shows some emotion, although we’re not entirely sure what that emotion is all about.
I thought I was doing a service by pinpointing the perspectives of the prostitutes and reporting on what law enforcement and others were doing about an unsafe situation. So then I thought it was pretty strange when my series and the Telegraph received a slew of hate mail (and some that was supportive and complimentary) with comments like:
“There is enough smut in the world without you promoting more stuff like this.”
“I strongly resent these articles on prostitution.”
“You need to keep this junk off the front page.”
Rather than empathy, that was these people’s responses to the stories of prostitutes in their own community. I wonder if their thinking has evolved by now, since Anora and Madison told the same kind of story and won Academy Awards for it.
4.5 out of 5 stars