****/****
starring Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef
screenplay by Tony McNamara, based upon the novel by Alasdair Gray
directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
by Walter Chaw Ex Machina by way of Anaïs Nin, Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things is a libertine exercise-cum-fable about the hypocrisies of politesse and the occasional eruptions of collective sexual hysteria designed exclusively for shackling women to proverbial bits and millstones. It is the final of three films in 2023 that use Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a launchpad for progressive genre explorations, locating in the novel’s stitched-together creature a fulsome metaphor for the indignities afforded the spirit encased in prisons of rotting flesh. Rather than quibble about the merits of one over the other, watch all three (Bomani J. Story’s The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster and Laura Moss’s Birth/Rebirth being the other two) in any sequence to witness the unfolding of an extended treatise on gender and racial politics delivered with brio, invention, wicked intelligence, and bracing creative courage. It’s possible to make a movie of a lecture, but it’s more effective to make dangerous, even experimental, art from which all manner of lecture and examination will eventually be constructed. The former is the province of creators limited by their fear and ignorance, the latter of mad scientists inordinately confident in the ability of their cinematic children to find a way through the rubble of a drowned and ruined world. I don’t know that these three films are the best three films of the year, but they’re among them, and certainly, they comprise an uncanny trilogy for a period in which the United States has stripped women of their bodily autonomy at the moment of a suspiciously-timed rise in fascist white nationalism and its handmaiden, Puritanism. They’re doing it in the open: raising a flag of moral panic waved by Evangelical fucknuts pushing hard for an Apocalypse they hope will consign everyone else on this burning Earth to a damnation born of their perverse, onanistic fetishism.
Poor Things is about all of that. It’s a Luis Buñuel film with the visual sensibility of Terry Gilliam, shot now and then through a bleary fisheye lens (something Lanthimos took a particular shine to on The Favourite) that brings to mind the distortions of antique stereoscopes and segmented by animated, black-and-white title cards in which the film’s hero, Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), is shown riding mythological beasts and transcending meteorological events. It’s avant-garde and post-modern, but what it really is is eternal. Bella is reanimated and doesn’t get the hang of her body right away, although she’s a quick study. She discovers masturbation fairly early on and then learns that men are glad to help her with the task. Her “father,” Dr. Godwin (Willem Dafoe beneath a ton of fabulous, Dick Tracy-esque prosthetics), whom Bella calls “God,” hires an assistant, a young medical student called Max (Ramy Youssef), to document Bella’s development. When Max wonders the obvious, God says he’s impotent but that Max, if he’s willing to agree to a restrictive contract that essentially keeps Bella prisoner in God’s mansion, should marry her. Unctuous barrister Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) is enlisted to draw up the papers but decides to make off with Bella instead. It’s an arrangement amenable to Bella, who would like to experience the world on the arm of a man who proclaims himself a “master cocksman”–her plan being that after a quick tour of the outside, she will return to marry mild-mannered Max. It’s a good plan, though no one likes it.
Poor Things is about how Bella knows exactly what she wants and goes after it–and how every single man who falls in love with her immediately tries to imprison her in some way, to make her a trophy like the mythical Jaguarundi Sean Connery’s Mark Rutland hunts in Hitchcock’s Marnie. Like that of Marnie, the middle of Poor Things is set on a boat, where a sea change occurs in the relationship between the picture’s central couple. Bella, however, is not going anywhere quietly. And she has a pretty good idea about how every man has an empty glass cage he’s keeping on the off-chance he comes across a woman he can own. In Marseilles, Bella decides to become a prostitute, because she needs sex and she needs money, too. Prostitution is an entirely reasonable means to an end for this creature of logic. Because most of her clients are filthy and inadequate, she thinks that sharing this information with clean-cut Duncan will flatter him, and she is puzzled at the fragility of this most demonstratively masculine of males. She might be new to this life thing, but she has the simple stuff figured out almost instantly. She wants to feel good, and everything she does in that pursuit is forbidden by men who are better able to control her by making her feel ashamed of herself. I don’t want you to think the movie’s dour and didactic like those reductive/remedial white-feminist blockbuster garbage fantasias (which also have their place in this calendar year for people who prefer children’s books to literature, why not? It’s a big boat, there’s room): Poor Things doesn’t summarize any of this in lengthy speeches written by children. No, I mean, Poor Things is explicit, just not in a way that demonstrates contempt for its audience.
Indeed, Poor Things says little but shows everything. Note the way that Bella speaks in short, declarative sentences (“Why pen book every nut?” she asks to learn why Max documents every single nut Bella eats in his journal), or how she calls sex “furious jumping” and observes a male’s comparatively pathetic sexual stamina as an unfortunate physical limitation she happily doesn’t share. She is surgically emasculating, which shines a light on how easy it is to humiliate men and how necessary it is despite their sometimes murderous response to it. There’s a scene where Duncan uses desperate, romance-coded-language to declare his intentions to Bella; when Bella plays it back for him–“So my choice is marry you or get murdered by you”–Lanthimos allows them to look at each other, she in disgust and he flabbergasted, for a full minute without saying anything. What more is there to say? Truly, there’s no rebuttal to Poor Things except through the same arguments the worst people in the world use to enact systems and regulations to humble women, shut them up, lock them into spaces where their reproductive potential might be jealously guarded by large, hairless primates pining for a harem but “settling” for just this one socially-approved broodmare: an incubator for the vehicle of mister’s genetic material. Bella’s outrage is told through her absolute defiance. She’s not “selfish” for her self-interest, not a “slut” for her desire for pleasure, not “difficult” for not wanting to be imprisoned–but how easily these descriptions and words come to mind when one casts for strategies to tame wild women. Bella wants to live her life, and she does that with complete dedication and a zealot’s fervour. She is the best and only acolyte of the Church of Bella. Take it or leave it. Hallelujah!
