Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos has been creating unique films with strange and particular humor for around fifteen years. His new feature film, Poor Things (Poor creatures), is no exception. It is perhaps his most twisted, irreverent and destabilizing work since Dogtooth (Canine), the feature film which revealed him internationally in 2009.
Winner of the Golden Lion at the most recent Venice Film Festival, Poor Things stars Emma Stone, remarkable in the role of Bella, an Englishwoman from a surreal Victorian era, literally saved from the waters by a mad scientist (Willem Dafoe) who made her his guinea pig thanks to a brain transplant. At the start of this improbable scientific experiment, she has the mental age of a young child.
Bella likes this Dr Paternalistic Frankenstein whom she calls God (his name is Godwin Baxter). Her pygmalion tries to “preserve her from the outside world”, while she gradually discovers her body, the pleasures of the flesh and what is more and less glamorous about human nature, thanks to an odyssey at sea in the company of a hedonistic lawyer (Mark Ruffalo). The adventure film is added to the learning story.
Bella is a Candide at the childhood stage, in perpetual wonder, particularly at the sensations of her adult body. She responds to his needs and his emerging desires without modesty, without prejudice or consideration for etiquette, decorum and social conventions. No matter what her jealous lover or new fiancé thinks, a D studentr Baxter (Ramy Youssef), of his unbridled discovery of sexuality and the consequences of his extreme frankness and spontaneity…
PHOTO ATSUSHI NISHIJIMA, PROVIDED BY SEARCHLIGHT PICTURES
Emma Stone in a scene from Poor Things
Bella’s limited vocabulary and childish mannerisms make for effective sight gags and hilarious witticisms. Not counting mutant animals, crossbreeding of species by the Dr Baxter – half duck, half goat, for example – who surround him in the corridors of the mansion.
Distilling his usual dark and absurd humor, the filmmaker of The Favorite offers through the sassy and uninhibited character of Bella a subversive fable about hypocrisy, of adults and men in particular, which can be interpreted as a feminist pamphlet against patriarchy and misogyny.
As in most of his films, especially the hilarious The Lobster, Lanthimos strays a bit along the way into subplots. Without revealing too much, Bella spends too much time scantily clad in Paris, during the last half of the film where she becomes more and more emancipated.
The fact remains that the adaptation of the homonymous novel by the late Scottish writer Alasdair Gray, published in 1992, is enjoyable, in every sense of the word. Lanthimos’ staging, brilliantly inventive and explosive, goes from distorted wide angle to homage to German expressionism, and from saturated colors to black and white. Poor Things is both excessive and transgressive, eccentric and bizarre, accessible and entertaining. Lanthimos at its most accomplished.
Indoors
Drama
Poor Things (V. F.: Poor creatures)
Yorgos Lanthimos
Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef, Mark Ruffalo
2:21 a.m.