The opening of Sean Baker’s 2024 indie film, Anora, takes you into the back rooms of a strip club called “Headquarters,” peppered with men sprawled in leather seats as young naked women gyrate on their groins. In soft-focus and voyeuristic, a facsimile of the male gaze, these first scenes make one wonder why softcore porn is doubling as an Oscar-nominated movie.

Ani – short for Anora – is 23, and one of the contracted women at Headquarters. Of Uzbek descent, she is feisty, scrappy, and always on alert for the next attack against her.

One night, the manager orders Ani to tend to a patronizer seeking a Russian speaker. Ani begrudgingly obliges and greets Vanya, whom she soon finds out is the son a Russian oligarch. A 21-year-old feckless man-child, Vanya spends his days playing video games and hosting lavish, drug-filled parties at his oceanfront Brooklyn mansion.

He hires Ani for a week-long, $15,000 “girlfriend experience.” the end of which, drunk on his paid-for-sex smorgasbord, proposes they marry in Las Vegas. Though the relationship between Ani and Vanya is manufactured and twisted by an acute power imbalance, Ani accepts as long as she gets a 3-carat diamond ring.

Rather than the Cinderella ending of the film’s precursor, “Pretty Woman,” Baker hauls us into a search-and-find jaunt ordered by Vanya’s irate parents and their hired thugs to hunt down the newlyweds and annul the marriage. Abandoned by Vanya and paid off by his parents, Ani returns to the modest house in Brighton Beach she shares with her sister.

Reviewers have showered extraordinary praise on Anora, from NPR to the New York Times, which called it “virtually unsurpassed in its use of place and architecture.” It has swept up the most prestigious prizes,including Canne’s  Palme d’Or and five Oscars, including for Best Director, Actress, and Picture.

Alongside this unmitigated acclaim, Anora is also applauded for showcasing prostitution as a job like any other, and Ani, empowered in it.

In real life, almost all prostituted people have traumatic histories of childhood sexual abuse, homelessness, or are sex trafficking victims, a legal status that doesn’t evaporate when one turns 18. Other than showing us that Ani is fatigued and prone to trigger-fast anger, we know nothing of Ani’s path that led her to a brothel. […]

 Read Taina Bien-Aimé’s op-ed in Women’s e-News.