“When we know the world, the world is ours,” the matron of a wistful brothel tells her subject, in a scene from Yorgos Lanthimos’ oddball satire Poor Things. It’s one of the few scenes from the film where the absurdity of a wicked in-the-middle-of-nowhere world meets a familiar feeling. A woman quite literally resurrected after death, has set out to learn the world. No learning, she will subsequently learn, is possible without depravity and degradation, the good coupled with the somewhat clairvoyant abilities of the bad. As much as pleasure and goodness are embalming, they are also memory wipes capable of erasing the tactile nature of all that is unavoidable. Poor Things is a bizarre, mad re-imagination of Frankenstein led by a peerless body-specific performance by Emma Stone.
Stone is Bella Baxter, a woman pieced together and brought back to life by the anatomist Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). Set in an eerie land and age where gothic architecture scrapes shoulders with comic-book pastels and phallic imagery, Poor Things is steampunk on Victorian age reversal drugs. A bit bonkers, so to speak, from the get go.
Bella’s return to life is a re-initiation (the film moves from monochrome to colour). She possesses the body, but none of the cognitive abilities to gracefully carry it. She is reborn quite literally, a blank slate. Her mentor and creator Godwin wants to restore in her a sense of culture and conservation, but like most juveniles, she chooses the toolbox of rebellion as a way of discovery.
She falls for the charms of Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), a playboy who regularly cajoles women into expeditions of the flesh. Together the two take a whimsical journey around the world, culminating in Bella settling in a brothel where she believes, she will get the two things she really wants – sex and stories. Taken at face value, the plot sounds like a nasty spoof of a stage production but it is executed with such dexterity and brilliance that the film both provokes and confounds your wisdom. Poor Things is social satire merged with the sci-fi optics of a retro-future so self-assuredly loony it’s near impossible to both admonish or adjudge it from distance. It just leaves your jaw on the floor.
Nominated for 11 Oscars, Lanthimos and Emma Stone have collaborated again (previously The Favourite) in a performance so challenging, it’s impossible to see how Stone won’t walk away with Best Actress nod. The graphic nudity, the countless sex scenes are all built into the character of a sharp but uncorrupted woman, learning to become a social animal; a low-key evolutionary journey, invigorated by the spotless nature of its subject. A subject played with near desexualised sternness by an actress who has evidently ‘given her all’.
Emma Stone is also ably assisted by a cast that includes Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef and the Oscar-nominated Ruffalo in a role that seamlessly blends his accessibility to the cocksure dullness of a cheesy philanderer. Wedderburn is slick, but also hilariously nervy and weak.
Poor Things is gloriously risky cinema for the way it pushes the boundaries of folklore, cultural authenticity and satire. Lanthimos goes for broke – much like he has always done – in a film so baroque and twisted it could so easily be classified as perverted. “I’m going to go and punch that kid,” Bella says, in a scene that only the warped but astute mind of Lanthimos could package as a comical near-accident. There is also a difference between sexuality as a banal visual excursion and sexuality as a narrative motif. Here it represents the latter, as the blooming of curiosity, of vice mixing with virtue, before the trite controlling design of the world tries to return the genie to the box. This after all, is the journey of an unlettered and therefore undiminished woman taking control of her life by quite simply refusing to acknowledge men, for anything other than fleshly opioids. On some level, it is the spiritual cousin of last year’s blockbuster Barbie.
Poor Things has already made over $100 million in overseas box office collections, before coming to India.
Lanthimos’ Poor Things is the latest addition to a filmography so unique and unsettlingly original, it would be near miraculous for the Greek director’s cinema to permeate drawing room conversations. This is cinema at its imaginative, provocative finest. And not merely for its aesthetic wackness alone or for the boldness of its female lead, but for the control and candour it holds all that chaos together. It isn’t just an absurd circus, full of freaks and geeky sub-cultural references, but a clear-sighted tale of a woman starting from intellectual scratch to arrive at a podium of knowledge by quite literally using her body as the sourcing instrument. It’s an untamed, wild world of fantasy and social friction and it belongs in your head where it will stay long after it has ended.
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