One of the year's buzziest films is Anora, a two-hour-twenty-minute love story turned screwball comedy from the director behind The Florida Project and Red Rocket, Sean Baker.
Anora premiered at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival in the Spring, where it was awarded the festival's highest accolade, the Palme d'Or, a prize given to the director of the Best Feature Film in the Official Competition each year at the festival.
Previous recipients include Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, Jane Campion's The Piano, Ken Loach's I, Daniel Blake, Bong Joon-ho's Parasite, and, in May, Baker became the most recent recipient when Anora took this year's Cannes by storm.
The film has been on a roll throughout this awards season, securing seven nominations at the Critics Choice Awards and five Golden Globe nominations.
Anora is also expected to bag multiple Oscar nominations, with the film's lead, Mikey Madison, one of the frontrunners to land a Best Actress nod come January.
Following a young sex worker, Anora sees our titular character fall into a whirlwind romance with the son of an oligarch, which goes south when his parents find out.
In a conversation with Pamela Anderson during Variety's Actors on Actors series, Anderson asked Mikey Madison whether there was an intimacy coordinator on set.
"For our film, we didn't," Madison said. "It was a choice that I made that the filmmakers offered to me if I wanted to bring on an intimacy coordinator or not."
Madison detailed the reasoning behind her choice, saying, "At the time, Mark Eydelshteyn, who plays Ivan in the film, we decided that it would be best just to keep it small with us, Sean Baker, the director, and Sammy Quan, his producing partner and his wife."
For a film that has so many intimate scenes, it came as a shock to fans that this choice was made.
i feel like pamela anderson is not the woman you should sit across from and boast about not using an intimacy coordinator… let’s nip this in the bud because regardless of how “small” you want a sex scene to be, intimacy coordinators are there for a very very important reason
— luca (@LucaGuadagnegro) December 17, 2024very questionable. sean baker is a known weirdo
— ً (@americanreqiuem) December 17, 2024This isn’t a good thing, intimacy coordinators are very important ...
— Bella Winter (@BellaWinterr) December 17, 2024Madison discussed the reasoning behind her choice at length, saying, "I was ready for it. It requires a lot of her body and her skin. I've said it before, but I think that she wears her nudity more like a costume, in a way. She presents herself in this sort of hyper-sexualized way because it's how she makes a living. It's just what she has to do. So I think that I also, as an actress, approached it in a way of like it being a job. So, I was very comfortable."
Anora received a new digital release date this week and is now available to rent and buy across Video on Demand platforms following a successful theatrical release, where it made $28.5 million at the worldwide box office.
It currently holds a Certified Fresh score of 96% from critics on Rotten Tomatoes and an audience score of 90%.
English (US) ·