By Carole Di Tosti . . .
In his most brilliant, inventively surrealistic film to date, award-winning Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things displays the artistic genius of the fantastical filmmaker noted for The Lobster and The Favourite. With a crackerjack cast of terrific actors to spool out his hybrid-genre tale that melds alternate realities of science fiction, fantasy and fable with a message that is current and powerful, Lanthimos took home the Golden Lion, winning this year’s Venice Film Festival’s top prize.
Currently, Poor Things is screening at the New York Film Festival 2023 in the Main Slate section and is a must-see. However, if you can’t get festival tickets via stand-by, it is set to be released on December 8, 2023.
In a Q&A after the press screening, Lanthimos revealed that he had considered filming the titular comic novel, written in 1992 by Scottish author Alasdair Gray, for years. Gray’s award-winning Poor Things satirizes Victorian England’s obsessions with social propriety, sexual repression and patriarchal bondage.
Decades later, Lanthimos took the leap and cobbled together an amazing design team to do justice to the realms of unimaginable surreality and magical beauty of the many worlds the characters travel through and inhabit on their journey toward freedom or devolution.
Screenwriter Tony McNamara’s adaptation of Poor Things chronicles the extraordinary, picaresque odyssey of the young Victorian woman, Bella Baxter. Emma Stone’s portrayal of Bella is mesmerizing, enlightened and full throttle. Bella, who committed suicide, was enlivened by the scientific genius of the eccentric Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe, in a breathtaking performance), who brings her to life by transplanting the brain of the child she was carrying into Bella’s skull.
When we first meet Bella, we don’t understand her jerky physical movements, her spitting out food, her halting speech or her socially unrestrained behavior, which also is hysterical in its indecorousness. However, Bella has a two-year-old’s brain in an adult woman’s body, and she must negotiate the paradox of her mind and personality catching up to her robust female figure.
We eventually understand her circumstances when Dafoe’s Godwin hires Max McCandles (Ramy Youseff), a forward-thinking student from his dissection class, to record Bella’s progress in the confines of his glorious mansion and grounds in London. That is where Godwin keeps Bella secreted away from prying, judgmental eyes and interference.
Though Godwin is a Dr. Frankenstein-ish figure, and Bella is his gorgeous monster—who ironically becomes an adept and maverick of evolutionary social reform—his reason for “saving” Bella is human and heartbreaking . . . as well as experimental. He seeks a salve for his aching loneliness and warped upbringing. As a child, he was horrifically maimed and abused in his father’s experiments, which included rearranging his organs and examining the limits of young Godwin’s pain thresholds in the interest of scientific advancement.
Unlike Godwin’s cold, unemotional and sadistic relationship with his scientist father, he and Bella have a sweet, loving relationship that continues through Bella’s rapid physical and mental development up to his reluctant, but necessary, release of her into the world.
Sewing money into her clothing for security, Godwin allows her to take off with his rakish, shady lawyer Duncan Wedderburn. Mark Ruffalo’s comedic portrayal of the foppish, licentious Victorian “gentleman” is priceless. Though she is engaged to Max, Godwin hopes that Bella can evolve her own understanding of humanity, womanhood, men, culture and identity through her encounters with others along with the serendipitous adventures she undertakes. She must take flight, learn about the world, and sink or rise up one day, eventually coming back to him.
Initially, her key adventure is sexual and Ruffalo’s Wedderburn, obsessed with her body, naivete and unfiltered, unschooled, personality, guides her with ferocity. The scenes are intimate and sexually explicit, but they are important in showing the evolution of Bella’s learning experiences about control, sexual freedom and patriarchy. Also, in these scenes we see that her sexual experiences are instrumental in helping her make the decision to overthrow her identity from her former life, which drove her to commit suicide while pregnant.
Bella is inspired to learn all she can about everything she can, so she advances herself by reading voraciously. Unrestrained by Wedderburn, she escapes his control in Paris. There she earns her own money as a sex worker. With the help of her philosophical madam and another sex worker she befriends, she discovers the political, financial and social constructs that define all men and women and ensnare them in self-defeating lies. Eventually, she returns to Godwin to care for him on his deathbed. In London, she finally confronts the man she sought to escape by suicide.
Lanthimos and his team have outdone themselves with their extraordinary scenic designs, cinematography, lighting, and costume design which speaks to their amazing originality and virtuosity. An extra bravo goes to Lanthimos whose creatives designed the twisted, kaleidoscopic visuals sans AI.
Poor Things is a film to enjoy two or three times in order to capture all of the symbolism related to the themes of Bella’s humorous journey toward freedom and self-identification. You may attempt to get tickets on standby at the NYFF 2023 website: https://www.filmlinc.org/nyff2023/daily/todd-haynes-may-december-will-open-the-61st-new-york-film-festival/?gad=1
