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Anora: a refreshingly radical depiction of sex work on film [1]
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Date: 2025-01
Anora, this year’s feisty update on the 1990 film Pretty Woman, has become something of a critical darling. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Palme d’Or. Its lead, Mikey Madison, has been tipped to win best actress at the Oscars. And The Guardian just named it one of 2024’s best films.
Watching Anora as a sex worker, I found it a welcome departure from the long list of reactionary and misogynist portrayals of workers in the sex industry. It’s certainly not a perfect film, and reviewers have been particularly split over the meaning of the last scene (there are dozens of takes on this).
But the plotline isn’t what sets Anora apart. The film’s representation of the work of sex is a quiet, radical act, and for that it deserves its accolades.
Most cultural products grappling with sex work fail to show even minimal respect to sex workers. We are made fun of, portrayed as dumb, vilified, blamed for our own misfortune, and abused without end. Many characters are simply killed off to hammer home the myth that overtly transactional relationships are inherently more dangerous than being a wife or girlfriend.
Anora has both violence and humour. But its eponymous main character, a Brooklyn stripper and sometimes escort who “goes by Ani”, wasn’t put on screen to be comic relief – or a moral lesson for the audience. She’s a class-conscious, modern-day Cinderella, and the story she tells revolves around her short, action-packed relationship with Ivan, an immature, entitled, and obscenely rich son of a Russian oligarch. It’s fun – a riot of colour and sharp editing that mixes rom-com lines with gangster comedy antics.
But pervading it all is the work of sex: the daily grind of selling services packaged as fantasies on a piece rate. In Anora, sex work is presented with complexity. For instance, the small displays of the whorearchy were interesting and pretty accurate. Ani may be played by a civvie actress (someone without lived experience of the sex industry), but the film’s directors paid sex workers to consult on the script and production. The result is one of the most nuanced representations of sex work ever to be put on film.
Nothing about us without us
The insistence on being included has long been a demand of the sex worker rights movement. A rallying call when it comes to the creation of government policies that directly impact sex workers, ‘nothing about us without us’ is also a clear demand on films, exhibitions and documentaries that attempt to represent sex work.
Sex workers demand a seat at the table because so few people have a realistic understanding of what it’s like to actually work in the sex industry. Society has long held a morbid fascination with the lives, and more accurately the bodies, of sex workers. But the way that sex work is policed and imagined traps sex workers as either objects of fantasy or bodies to be condemned, and it fundamentally prevents empathy and warps all comprehension. Sex workers need to speak for themselves as a corrective to this. We need to speak for ourselves because the conversation is about us.
The migrant sex worker rights collective the x:talk project, which formed in London in 2006, sum it up well:
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