We are all, in some ways, our own unholy creations
dir: Yorgos Lanthimos
2023
I remember being amazed at the success of Yorgos Lanthimos several years ago when The Favourite became so feted and popular, getting all the awards and plaudits and … does anyone even remember The Favourite now? I mean, sure, it only came out in 2018, but that feels like a hundred years ago now.
I guess what I found so surprising is that all the weird goofiness of how Lanthimos puts his films together wasn’t enough to dissuade audiences or lose Olivia Colman an Oscar for Best Actress.
And if anyone thinks the path of an idiosyncratic director is to become less idiosyncratic as the budgets get bigger and the casts more A-List, well, I don’t think that’s the path he’s on at the moment. If anything…
Poor Things, if it was watched by a lot of people last year, and if it’s watched by more people on streaming etc this year, will be one of the weirdest flicks many people have seen in a good long while. And that’s not just the subject matter or the frequent uses of fish eye anamorphic lenses that make certain scenes look like they were filmed through someone’s front door peephole.
Maybe there’s a bit lifted from Frankenstein, but I don’t think thematically it has as much in common, at all. Man’s hubris in seeking to be like God by creating life is not questioned here; there’s no cautionary aspect. Our creation here, being Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), is not the monster, even if her creation is a ghastly act of unholy Science run amok.
It’s based on a book, by Alisdair Gray, which I have not read, but looking at the list of books he’s written, he seems like an absolute Scottish legend, and I’d be more than curious to read the one this is based on, as well as the others.
I think the only acknowledgement they make of the story’s Scottish origins is the appallingly inconsistent attempt at a Scottish accent that Willem Dafoe assays playing the character of God(win) Baxter, Bella’s creator. It’s like he starts a sentence and then towards the end of it remembers “oh yeah, I’m meant to be doing an accent” and then throws a big of a brogue over the last syllables. It’s so comical that I couldn’t even tell if it was deliberate on the director’s part, or whether he just gave up.
Speaking of accents, lookie here, another famous and popular actor, if not beloved, in the form of Mark Ruffalo, playing an absolute cad and bounder in the form of Duncan Wedderburn, who delights and eventually tries to torment Bella in unequal measure.
What fucking accent was he trying to do? And did he forget, every now and then, whatever accent it was that he was hinting at, or was he shocked as well by some of the things that were coming out of his mouth?
Of course for me stuff like that reminds me I’m watching a movie, but this is such an odd kind of flick, that being reminded of the artifice doesn’t necessarily detract from the experience that much. Every film by Yorgos Lanthimos doesn’t shy away from having scenes that remind the audience that everything is artificial and constructed.
We forget how inherently unnatural cinema is as an art form.
Lanthimos is here to remind us. And he does it, in this flick at least, with a level of set design and art direction that is extreme, sumptuous and macabre. And though some (strange, perhaps lazy) critics bring up Wes Anderson, well, that’s bonkers. The approach here is not fussy, fastidious or obsessed with compositional symmetry at all, at all. It is messy, organic, sensual and diseased.
But it’s still alienating, maybe in a good way(?)
The story is mostly a picaresque journey, one mostly focussed on the Education of one Miss Bella Baxter, who matures from a baby with the body of a woman to a woman who questions what is best in life in the space of a few weeks of existence. There is much humour derived from the physicality of Emma Stone striding around, boldly and tentatively, as a giant baby, or her mangling of phrases and words, or her delighting in her bodily functions.
To the very Victorian era men around her, she is very much a Galatea to their Pygmalion, and as such, in ways that cannot help but be loathsomely creepy, even when she has the mind of a child, they want to have sex with her, blank slate carved from marble that she is. At least they wait long enough for her to have discovered sex itself and its joys before swooping down upon her.
Sex plays a big part in this story. I guess it’s impossible to separate the issues of female pleasure and bodily autonomy in a story where a person strives towards becoming fully human. Bella discovers self-pleasure, and enjoys it a lot, before wanting to explore her sexuality further with Mark Ruffalo’s character, and, issues of mental capacity and consent aside, who can really blame her. He styles himself as being an accomplished cocksman, and I have seen no evidence to the contrary as yet.
After bursting forth from the confines of her captivity, Bella goes through different iterations of men wanting to either confine her or control her sexuality or both, which of course means she ends up in a brothel, which is ick, but, just like in all these types of stories, the more people Bella is exposed to or learns from, the more she learns about the world and herself.
One striking element of the story is that most of the people Bella meets along the way are pretty much wrong about everything they try to teach her as being some ironclad rule of life or existence. Godwin insists that as an experiment she should be happy as a kept pet or a hothouse flower. His assistant Max (Ramy Youseff) thinks he’ll be able to control her if he just puts a ring on it, with seemingly no intention of trying to please her himself.
Wedderburn (Ruffalo), while taking Bella on a cruise, thinks he’ll have sex with her a bunch of times, break her heart, then dump her in some squalid European town, but it doesn’t quite work out that way. He is threatened by her sexuality, seeing as she pursues her pleasure for her own sake, and not his, and this is far too emasculating for him.
Bella meets a delightful older German woman (Hannah Schygulla) on-board the ship that very much looks like a version of the Nautilus from Jules Verne, who tells her to do whatever she wants, but not to get too fixated on sex, because even that desire fades over time. A cynical companion to the lady (Jerrod Carmichael), being a cynic, tries to convince her that nothing matters, people can’t change, and all they want is cruelty and to dominate others. Also, all systems, whether capitalistic or socialistic, altruistic or neo-liberal, none of them work, none of them improve anything. Then he shows her a pit filled with dead babies just to prove his point.
It’s hard to argue with rock hard logic like that.
The madame at the Parisian bordello (the always delightful and terrifying Kathryn Hunter) tries to convince her that the only key to happiness is through earning money, making serious bank, acting as if she doesn’t want or enjoy sex, and basically enduring the sweaty, smelly attentions of men until she no longer can.
Her sort of girlfriend at the brothel, Toinette (Suzy Bemba) tries to teach her that liberation will come through socialism and cunnilingus, and that’s an argument practically no-one can disagree with.
And then, last of all, a man turns up, a General (Christopher Abbot) no less, claiming ownership of her, body and mind, wanting to return her to a macabre mansion where clearly many horrors transpired, to assert not only that she can never transcend her origins, but that she will lose even the little agency that she possesses, being access to her own sexual pleasure.
Almost everyone is wrong. Everyone except Bella. Every epiphany, every realisation builds on a previous one, until she finds that the only meaning she’ll be able to derive from life is pretty much to ignore what everyone else says and figure things out for herself, read as many books as she can, and forget whatever bullshit society tries to impose upon her.
I find the takes that assert that this is a modernist feminist fable or some kind of treatise supporting self-fulfilment through bodily autonomy etc to be pretty laughable. Much as I think it’s a visual feast and pretty funny, and quite inventive and interesting most of the time, the overarching plot and the underlying themes are, to use the technical term, bullshit.
This plot? This is the plot of at least a thousand European skinflicks about some innocent waif who’s used and abused by evil men until she comes to the attention of, I dunno, some rich person who saves her from poverty. I am all for people achieving self-determination and enjoying themselves consensually in this life to the absolute utmost, but the idea that the path to identity lies in voluntarily throwing oneself into a brothel (but always staying in command, somehow), is possibly the most fantastical aspect of the whole story, beyond the re-animation of corpses or the idea that someone could give birth to themselves.
Bella’s freedom, hate to say it, at the end, has nothing to do with feminist awakenings or daring – it happens because of the economic security provided by her creator, which will keep her in the luxury to which she has become accustomed. Those other arguments are a bit baffling to me.
But none of it gives me pause in terms of enjoying Emma Stone’s performance. The performance is magnificent. Her every line reading is superb. And then there’s those massive caterpillar eyebrows.
And the costumes! I rarely comment on or even notice costuming, but those dresses and outfits, that grow and change along with her, are amazing, truly amazing constructions.
And the dance scene, where she tries to enjoy herself by stomping all over the place, and Ruffalo has to keep getting in the way, trying to force her to conform, how amazing is that?
That’s not to ignore just how strange it all is. It’s fucking bonkers, and not always in a ‘good’ or enjoyable way. There are bits where, I’ll be honest, I was bored out of my fucking mind. I never thought I’d ever say, of a movie, that’s there’s too much Ruffalo, but that bit on the boat could have lost 20 minutes of his character yelling abuse at Bella, and it would have not been missed at all.
And there’s plenty of weird shit that’s weird for weirdness’s sake that adds nothing to the story other than running time. I’m not going to single the scenes out, but I rolled my eyes a fair bit, and wondered how many more awful anecdotes from Willem Defoe I was going to have to listen to.
Poor Things. Who’s that a reference to? Why, the audience, of course.
8 times sometimes the perfection of the art design overwhelms the capacity of the human eye and mind to absorb it all out of 10
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“I must go punch that baby!” - Poor Things
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