At the 2025 Oscars, the film "Anora" received 6 nominations, including important categories such as Best Actress, Best Actress, Best Director...
The film was released at the end of 2024, won the Golden Rooster Award at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival and many other film awards. Sean Senior's work is highly appreciated on the race to reach the prestigious Oscar gold statue.
As soon as it was released, many Vietnamese audiences realized that "Anora" had the same motif as "Mai" by Tran Thanh - the Vietnamese film with the highest revenue in history.
"Mai" and "Anora" are both named after the female lead, both telling stories about the dream of changing the lives of girls who are considered the bottom of society, doing scandalous work.
Mai (Phuong Anh Dao) is a nearly 40-year-old girl, a massage therapist, with a daughter, so it is difficult to find complete love. She went through many tragedies from a young age, her heart was arid until she met and fell in love with Duong (Tuan Tran).
When her passionate love breaks down again, Mai still feels sorry for the man who did not wait for her, even though he has become the manager of a resort. Meanwhile, Duong was a laxative and playful man with his mother's money, and at the end of the film, he was still a man who depended on his mother and could not decide his own life.
When released in theaters, "Mai" caused controversy because of its message about love, about women's happiness, and the perspective on girls doing work that is not valued by society. Although they loved each other, both Mai and Sau surrendered to fate and refused to fight for love.
Mai's story was filled with tears, noise, and deadlock, and at the end of her life she was still miserable, successful but still full of inferiority complex.
Meanwhile, Anora (Mikey Madison) is portrayed as a physical, fierce, and carefree street dancer.
"Anora" with a passionate first half, a tragic middle, and a harsh ending has made one of the best films of the year.
The Washington Post commented that Anora and Vanya were in love and made a sudden decision to register their marriage in Las Vegas. For Anora, Vanya's lavish lifestyle is romantic for her - a young woman living in a dilapidated house with her roommate, and doing work that is disregarded by the world.
When watching "Anora", the audience was angry, seeing the garden of a girl dancing to get rid of drugs suddenly destroyed. Gen Z star Mikey Madison had an emotional transformation into the role of Anora.
From the quirky look when looking for customers in the nightclub, the helplessness when blaming her "husband" for being tied up and losing her wedding ring, the fierce response when being called "rarely" by the world to the moment she sat silently in the car to get married, Mikey Madison depicts a character with complex inner thoughts.
Measuring Anora and Vanya's love is numbers, 15,000 USD for 1 week of dating, 15,000 USD for wedding anniversary, a 4- carat diamond wedding ring. Through each turn of life, Anora became more mature, and then became bitterly aware of the brutal reality.
By the end of the film, Anora had a complex psychological development. She crazy curse and scold her fiance as a cheap, useless person, responds to all those who have disregarded her, and bursts into tears on Igor's shoulder after the misery he has endured.
"Director Sean Senior left important questions. What is the price of a beautiful woman? What is the price she has to pay? And what would the world be like without any price? , the Washington Post wrote.
"Anora" is also as noisy and chaotic as "Mai", but at its peak, the film is quiet and bare, like Anora's loneliness in the fight for survival.
Compared to "Mai", "Anora" brought an open ending, but was realistic and harsh. Many Vietnamese audiences believe that the difference between the two films comes from the director's perspective on humanity, character thinking and the ability to convey stories through cinematic language.
