Ironically to describe Yogos Lanthimos’s latest film Poor Things requires the richest of vocabularies.
Grotesque, beautiful, hilarious, heart wrenching, fearless, horrific, filthy, garish, demented, phantasmagorical, anarchic, audacious, batshit, satirical, astonishing, surreal, bizarre, luscious, breath-taking, beguiling, hopeful, political, philosophical and absurdist – and for me simply wonderful.
At the end I wanted to stand up and cheer; cheer the film, cheer Lanthimos and all his crew, cheer Bella Baxter the protagonist, and cheer Emily Stone for her amazing re-creation of her. But, as you may infer from my opening paragraph, you may not feel the same.
If you did not enjoy The Killing of the Sacred Deer or The Favourite I cannot recommend that you go and see this film. You may well hate it. If you did enjoy either of them and are willing to follow Yorgos Lanthimos further along his journey then buckle up and go for it!
Poor Things is set in an Steam-Punk Victorian Age – with surreal and anachronistic elements, adapted by Tony McNamara from the eponymous novel by Alistair Grey, and tells the story of Bella, a Frankensteinian creation who is literally her own mother and her own child – the body of a resurrected young woman with the brain of her own unborn child transplanted with her own. This was achieved by the surgeon Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), who was himself horrifically experimented on surgically by his own father. Godwin is called God by Bella.
When we first meet her she behaves like a small child. She does not know how to speak, eat, walk, behave – or to think. She is a true innocent. Totally uninhibited, selfish, impulsive and cruel, shame and guilt free. That is, after all how we all start. Stone’s physical acting here is phenomenal, and I remember how she credibly portrayed Billy Jean King in The Battle of the Sexes. We then follow Bella’s education; physical, intellectual, emotional, social, philosophical, sexual and moral.
Some of this ‘education’ takes her on a cruise round the Mediterranean in the company of an unscrupulous, hilarious, lascivious and oddly charming lawyer, Duncan Wedderburn, played with enormous gusto by Mark Ruffalo. We have also met Max McCandless, (Ramy Youssef) a student of Baxter commissioned to study her development, who falls in love with her.
In many ways this is like the odyssey of the equally innocent Candide in Voltaire’s satirical attack on Leibniz’s ‘This is the best of all possible Worlds’ philosophy, and Baxter being called God is surely relevant here. (Discuss.)
In some ways this is like Odysseus’s Odyssey, as he too toured the ancient Mediterranean trying to find his way home – and in my reading find out who and what he really was. In Odysseus’ case, it could be argued, he was ultimately no more and no less than Penelope’s husband.
In Bella’s case, it seems to me, she finds she herself to be a truly liberated, fulfilled and admirable person - and of course a woman.
Her story is properly shocking. There are many (MANY) very graphic sex scenes, and Emily Stones performance is as uninhibited, audacious and moving as the part requires. There are of course important questions that need to be raised by sex on screen but as Ms Stone came on board as a co-producer of the move early in its development, and had worked with Lanthimos before, most recently in The Favourite, she obviously trusted him – and the Intimacy Consultant they used. I am also sure these scenes are essential to the film.
The Photography, by the veteran Irish cinemaphotographer Robby Ryan, is inventive and ravishing. He had also shot The Favourite for Lanthimos, plus Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank and Wuthering Heights, Ken Loach’s Angel’s Share, I, Danial Blake, and Jimmy’s Hall, John Maclean’s Slow West, Noah Baumbach’sMarriage Story, Stephen Frear’s Philomena, and Nick Cave’s Idiot Prayer (among many other music videos. (Sorry to go on, but I think the combination of Director and Cinematographer is really important.)
It is Edited, immaculately as ever, by Yorgos Mavropsaridis.
The Production Design by James Price and Shona Heath is as astonishing and beautiful as the film absolutely requires it to be.
The music, by first time English film composer Jerskin Fendrix (real name Joscelin Dent-Pooley) is wedded to Bella’s progressive humanisation,
and the Costume Design by Holly Waddington illustrates her emergence as from a chrysalis to a butterfly.
