Since the premiere of Poor Things (Poor creatures) in Venice, where the film won the Golden Lion, many are predicting a second Oscar for actress Emma Stone. And for good reason ! The star of La La Land (For the love of Hollywood) is absolutely brilliant as a young woman who, after being brought back from the dead, embarks on an emancipatory odyssey. Revived “at the Frankenstein » by a deformed scientist in 19th century Englande fantasy century, this Bella Baxter turns out to be a captivating, funny, touching, and wonderfully unique character.
Dark but bright comedy, fanciful but full of sharpness, erotic but not titillating, Poor Things doesn’t look like anything. This is one of his many qualities.
The first part, in black and white in line with the heroine’s limited worldview, shows Bella as a woman-child. Recently “returned to the world”, she has the skills and behaviors of a little girl. Except that she learns quickly, and the more she discovers, the more she is eager to know. So much so that one day, Godwin Baxter, her “creator”, decides to let her go.
For her exhilarating initiatory adventure, Bella chooses Duncan, a libertine lawyer, as her partner: the agreement is purely sexual, the first being very curious in this department as well.
What follows turns out to be unpredictable, delirious, but perfectly cohesive, as Bella continues her many apprenticeships while resisting each attempt at control over her person by others. Not speaking like that, not dressing like that, not behaving like that: very little for her. She has no filter and acts as she pleases.
Here, it’s time for color. With the architecture fusing Victorian and Art Nouveau styles, and with the dapper palette, it feels like a live-action adaptation of a Hayao Miyazaki animation (for the look, not for the content; we are thinking specifically of the film The Howl’s Moving Castle).
Confinement and emancipation
Finding one of the stars of his splendid The Favorite (The favorite), Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos offers an entire universe, both deliberately artificial and totally immersive. Perhaps emboldened by the crazy experiments of his not-so-mad scientist (Willem Dafoe, distant, then touching), Lanthimos pushes his formal daring even further. Coming from the director of singulars The Lobster (Lobster) And The Killing of a Sacred Deer (The killing of the sacred deer), That’s saying something.
We think, for example, of this occasional use of an objective “ fish-eye ”, or “fish eye”, which gives a blocked spherical image. In a previously unpublished passage from the filmmaker’s virtual conference that we recently attended, Lanthimos clarified this in this regard: “It’s part of a visual language that director of photography Robbie Ryan and I have been developing for The Favorite, and which we wanted to enrich. We tested these lenses at the time, but gave up: it was too much. For this film on the other hand, with the surrealist content, it was justified; it exacerbated the intermittent feeling of confinement. »
Confinement, literally and then figuratively, from which Bella tries to escape through her wanderings.
Cinematic eternity
Free adaptation – which is not lacking in relevance since it is a thirst for absolute freedom that motivates Bella – of a novel by Alasdair Gray, Poor Things almost did not see the light of day. After ten years of trying to interest a studio, Yorgos Lanthimos managed to convince one: Searchlight Pictures, channel of 20th Century Fox, owned by Disney.
We are grateful to the filmmaker for having demonstrated, like his heroine, stubbornness.
While we write a lot about “superhero film fatigue” and about the serial flops in this genre that was once invincible at the box office, it is reassuring to note that Hollywood remains capable of financing such a baroque, extravagant work. and, ultimately, politics.
Regardless, with her intrepid and radical composition of a character given a second life, Emma Stone enters cinematic eternity.