WHERE IS ANORA?: a Film Review

🎬 Anora, dir. Sean Baker (2024)

📍Screened at the cinema

Counter Gaze Meter: ★★☆☆☆ - Performative Gaze

Where is Anora? Anora the film of the year and the winner of Best Picture yet while an eponymous movie, Anora the woman is nowhere to be found. Through the glitz, the glam and the comedic sequences of the film, Anora is illustrated as a strong and intelligent character seeking to survive in an unequal patriarchal class-divided society. However, Anora is buried under a superficial narrative that ends up, in my opinion, "cheaping her out". Her quest to find her young and rich but incredibly immature newly-married husband, albeit a very fun sequence, does not allow any space to fully understand the depth of her despair in finding him. Is it for the money? Is it for love? Anora as a character is supposed to stand for the women who have been objectified for their whole lives and have managed to weaponize that objectification and making it profitable to them. However, the ending scene that is supposed to demonstrate Anora shattering that façade of strength and showing her vulnerability through her tears does the opposite in my opinion. Igor the supposed "nice guy" who loves her for who she is and the only thing Anora thinks she has to offer is her body does not equate to the depiction of Anora throughout the film of intelligence, confidence and wit. In other words, SHE IS BETTER THAN THAT. There is not enough substance between her and Igor to warrant such reaction.

What is more, from Sean Baker's "#notallmen" moment in the whole "stopping her from escaping, tying her up" comedic masquerade to Anora, from her experiences with men as a sex-worker, says to Igor that he would have raped her had they been in private is a glaringly scary sequence. A moment of real experience fear and pain expressed by Anora is painted as COMEDY, framed as her being "CRAZY". This was very disappointing to me as it communicates the wrong idea, as yes from the audience perspective we know the intent of the Russian men stopping her, yet from her perspective, she was scared of these foreign men tying her down. Such fear of men manhandling women is a universal fear for women for which I consider that Sean Baker ridicules by making the audience laugh at her "craziness".

Moreover, can we talk about these sex scenes and nudity??? I don't think it was overly done or she was overly objectified beyond what the story would warrant naturally, however, the ABSENCE of intimacy coordinators makes it LARGELY problematic to me. Anora's star Mikey Madison admitting that WE did not feel the need to have any on the set was quite shocking to me as there is no WE. She is a rookie female actress on the set of a film directed/written/produced/edited by Sean Baker, it was him and him only who made this decision. Also the fact that him and his wife, a producer in this movie, would enact the sexual positions for her is quite disturbing to me and I question the ethics of that.

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Counter Gaze Meter: ★★☆☆☆ - Performative Gaze

Anora is an overall fun film, aesthetically beautiful and dynamic attempt to a modern Pretty Woman that masquerades as a feminst pro sex-worker film, yet falls victim to a white heterosexual male director's skewed ideas of what femininity and feminism is in our modern society. What is seen as challenging patriarchal ideals of women's autonomy and agency in this film is in fact just reinforcing the image of women as fragile damsels in distress who need saving.

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