Unbiased, shameless and politically incorrect. That’s how it is poor creatures (Poor Things), the film by Yorgos Lanthimos with Emma Stone which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and will surely garner a multitude of Oscar nominations next Tuesday.
Precisely the Oscar-winning actress for La La Land bet on strong, hot roles. Here she is Bella Baxter, a nymphomaniac and deformed. A young pregnant woman who jumps into the waters of the Thames from a bridge and drowns. She is rescued by a surgeon (Baxter, played by Willem Dafoe), who brings her back to life.
As? Well, she takes out her brain and puts in the brain of the baby she had in her womb.
Bella’s body has no correlation with her brain, so she must learn to speak, communicate and recognize what is politically and socially correct. It is not easy, especially when around her Baxter, who has a disfigured face with cuts, has also created different combinations of animals (pig’s head, goose body, among others).
Bella, for example, learns to know pleasure by inserting fruits into her vagina.
Baxter, whom Bella simply calls God, has been subjected to all kinds of experiments by his father as a child. And he hires a student to assist him. Yes, there is a lot of Frankenstein floating around on the screen. And yes, as Max (Ramy Youssef) observes, Bella is growing fast and acquiring about 15 new words a day. She even walks better now, although she is still clumsy with her body and she is extremely curious about the things that happen outside the house.
The backgrounds are very theatrical and the costumes are somewhere between Victorian and the ’60s.Everything that is known, applauds and criticizes
The Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos is based on the novel by Alasdair Gray Poor Things, but he sifts it with everything he is known for, applauded and criticized. Aesthetically, the scenery and photography (in black and white and color) are truly impressive. It is Europe in 1880, between London, Lisbon and Paris, but the backgrounds are deliberately false and theatrical and the costumes combine Victorian with the style of the ’60s.
And stylistically it’s like The favourite -where Stone had already worked with Lanthimos-, Lobster, The sacrifice of the sacred deer o Canine. That is: surreal microcosms (the cities are somewhere between futuristic and from the past, very much in the style of Terry Gilliam) and an exacerbated taste for the macabre, whether in sexual or dramatic terms.
Emma Stone, the woman with a baby brain, and Mark Ruffalo.Mark Ruffalo It’s Duncan, the libertine who takes Bella to Lisbon, and he doesn’t look out of place in this trio of protagonists, but the one who gets all the attention is the actress from Cruellawho gets naked in several sex scenes.
Lanthimos is provocative as always, although somewhat indulgent. He draws Baxter as a guy who feels pride in his child, you could even say it’s a father/daughter relationship. He is inciting, he can make us look to the side or wrinkle our nose in some scenes. If, as Hitchcock said, copying oneself is style, poor creatures It is a Lanthimos in its purest form.
Dramatic comedy. Ireland / United Kingdom / United States, 2023. Original title: “Poor Things”. 142’, SAM 16. Of: Yorgos Lanthimos. Con: Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Mark Ruffalo, Ramy Youseff. Salas: Hoyts Abasto and Dot, Cinemark Palermo, Cinépolis Avellaneda and Recoleta, Showcase Belgrano and Quilmes.