Post by Dracula on Dec 30, 2023 13:18:57 GMT -5
Poor Things(12/21/2023)
That sense of perspective is central to the film because much of the point its making comes from watching this person go through the world without having various sexual and societal mores baked into them from a young age. For instance, when first introduced to sex she seems to view it less as a deep bond and more as a fun activity and later on she sees no reason why anyone should see shame in prostitution and doesn’t see a reason for the various acts of domestication imposed on women. In that sense the film is pretty intensely feminist in its outlook, which is interesting given that it director, screenwriter, and source novel writer are all men. That said the film isn’t entirely a Being There/Forrest Gump style endorsement of naiveté as there are things Bella says and does that are basically ignorant and unworkable, like her out of control reaction after learning about a homeless encampment at one point. Still, the movie is mostly about the benefits of seeing past societal dogmas and in this sense the film sort of contrasts with the general pessimism of Lanthimos’ other films, which tend to look at much more flawed characters who are ultimately forced to make difficult decisions which will lead to flawed outcomes but this one generally has more of an optimistic outlook. That’s a big part of why I expect this to have a wider audience than Lanthimos’ other movies, it takes the strangest route you could imagine to accessibility and yet it still gets there and I’m not sure if Lanthimos is going to be able to pull off this trick again. The degree of difficulty couldn’t have been higher and the movie still hit it out of the park.
****1/2 out of Five
When Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2010 film Dogtooth was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film award at the 83rd Annual Academy Awards it was considered something of a shocking choice. The film, with its unconventional premise and themes of incest and child abuse was considered to be more shocking and taboo breaking and just weird than what you would normally expect from the often conservative Academy. It was believed that was a movie that was saved by “the executive committee” a stopgap that was in place at the time to make sure the larger international film branch didn’t “snub” any particularly important works of world cinema and the Academy may have gotten more than they bargained for from that “save.” At the time I assumed that this would be something of a fluke and this would be the last time that Lanthimos would be able to trouble the Academy, but that proved to be something of an underestimate of both Lanthimos and the Academy. Lanthimos’ English language debut The Lobster managed to score Lanthimos a Best Original Screenplay nomination despite being about as weird as anything he made in Greece. But Lanthimos real breakthrough with the Academy and prestige cinema audiences more widely was 2018’s The Favourite, which merged Lanthimos’ “weird wave” sensibilities with the prestige costume drama to delicious results. That film appears to have bought the director a lot of clout and gave him the budget to make his latest film Poor Things which may well score even more of a contender come award season.
Poor Things begins in a sort of alternate steam punk version of Victorian England in the laboratory of a mad surgeon with massive facial scarring named Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), who prefers to go by the name “God” which gives you a pretty good idea of the guy’s ego. While demonstrating surgical technique at an academy he spots a promising student named Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) and invites him over to his home and offers him a special job: keeping track of his signature creation, a woman named Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) who appears to have some sort of mental impairment. Soon Baxter explains his “creation:” he spotted a depressed pregnant woman who jumped off a bridge in desperation, recovered the brain dead body, then used one of his experimental surgical techniques to implant the unborn child’s brain into the body of the adult woman. The resulting entity is a woman who seems normal at first glance outside of some concealed scars but who stumbles about with questionable motor skills and who speaks in a strange syntax and vocabulary that’s like Clockwork Orange Nadsat by way of Yoda. She can barely walk at first but she quickly becomes more and more human and eventually starts seeking out freedom from the house she’s been confined to and eventually finds a way out when a rakish attorney named Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) finds out about her and offers to take her on a trip to Portugal and elsewhere which will firmly shape her unique worldview.
Lanthimos’ movies have never exactly taken place in the “real” world but they have mostly taken place in worlds that at least look nominally like our own on their surface before people start doing strange things in them. With Poor Things he’s made a world that looks as unusual as everyone behaves, and in an odd way this makes the movie more accessible rather than less. At first the sets just looks like lightly more stylized versions of typical 19th Century buildings but then we start getting things like literal horseless carriages and strange looking boats and basically everywhere they go seems even stranger than the last. In a way the fact that everything is weird takes away the more uncanny valley nature of the weirdness of some of the characters that we get from some of Lanthimos’ other movies, which is maybe a bit of a sacrifice but I think it’s worth it. All of this is in part being done to present the film as being the world as seen through the eyes of its central figure, Bella, not necessarily in a gimmicky way but certainly by implication and that also makes for a good use of Lanthimos’ signature fisheye lenses.
****1/2 out of Five
