Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos has been creating unique films with strange and particular humor for around fifteen years. His new feature film, Poor Things, 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 him 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 is fond of this paternalistic Dr. 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 her needs and emerging desires without modesty, without prejudice or consideration for etiquette, decorum and social conventions. No matter what her jealous lover or her new fiancé, a student of Dr. Baxter (Ramy Youssef), think of her unbridled discovery of sexuality and the consequences of her extreme frankness and spontaneity…
Bella’s limited vocabulary and childish mannerisms make for effective sight gags and hilarious witticisms. Not to mention the mutant animals, crosses of species by Dr. Baxter – half-duck, half-goat, for example – which surround him in the corridors of the mansion.
As in most of his films, especially the hilarious The Lobster, Lanthimos gets a little lost 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.
