By Sam Maguire
Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things is a superb start to the year of UK cinema. The director of Dogtooth, The Favourite, and writer of The Lobster has done something quite remarkable here, with a celebration of cinema that walks the line between whimsical and sober.
Based off a 1992 novel, Poor Things takes us to the milieu of Victorian London, where we are introduced to Emma Stones Bella Baxter, a grown woman with the mind of an infant. Under the strict tutelage and scientific observation of Willem Dafoe’s Godwin, or more suitably God, we follow Bella’s daily life as she begins to learn the lessons of life.
Played with superb range and sensitivity by Stone, Bella initially at least is all jerky movement, pointy elbows and stunted shuffling with a childish vocabulary. The fluidity of her performance sees Bella incrementally grow in nuance and complexity before our eyes.
Bella is revealed to us as the result of the crude science experiment, after God discovered her pregnant body, following her botched suicide attempt, making the decision of substituting her brain for her child’s in pursuit of scientific truth. This is the plot contrivance which explains Bella’s underdevelopment, and with childlike wonder she soon escape the confines of God’s Gothic turned prison, whisked away in tight embrace of devilish womaniser Mark Ruffalo’s Duncan Wedderburn, leaving her bemused fiancé at home.
Here, Poor Things opens up, assuming the qualities of a theatre production, the cities of Lisbon and Paris squeezed into a picture perfect stage, as we see Bella run, jump, scramble, complain and berate back and forth from one corner to another, each interaction adding a grain of substance to her developing character and world view.
Eventually, she becomes sure of herself, emboldened, this sets her up for a showdown with God, her creator, and the beats from there are not unexpected.
Where Poor Things excels is its courage and imagination, its cinematic flair. And conviction in its intentions. Its core narrative, that a woman’s wish to die has been unilaterally denied, and her life extended in the most cruel circumstance could easily be done with glower and gloom, if not for the performances, which are too dynamic and thoughtful to linger in dourness. The vision that this should be a celebration of life, not a rebuttal radiates throughout.
Whirring away with the energy of a musical and with the ergonomic stagecraft of a play Poor Things motors along aided by its superb script that accommodates both slapstick and dry humour alike while intelligently remains fixed on Bella’s journey. This journey touches on subjects such as sexual self discovery, Parisian prostitution, poverty and tyrannic, rogue generals to boot. As we largely see the film from Bell’s perspective her relative innocence, her uncomplicated and uncompromised perception of the world removes the ambiguity we take for granted in life. Here dark and serious topics are treated with derision, and dismissed with the compelling ease that we wish we could do.
That is until perhaps 2/3 of the way in, when a note of moderation appears, as Bella begins to appreciate grey needs to exist between the white and black.
Poor Things therefore is able to flow at both registers, one the more comedic and ditsy, as Bella learns about masturbation or “how to make yourself feel good whenever you want” to her abrupt discovery of poverty, which is intended to land with straight with heft.
I am sure there will be some that decry Poor Things as overtly feminist, and they would say this is a problem because it infantilises too many male characters, elevates the women, and makes plot points predictable.
I do not see the film as overtly feminist, and what of it, were it so? Poor Things often capers more like a fairy tale, making no claims over historical accuracy. That is moves to shine a light on female plight is not a detraction, it is an addition, a film that sails on its own buoyancy and joy but has the conviction to stand for something is not a bad thing at all.
Rating: 5/5