Poor Things dir by Yorgos Lanthimos
When Poor Things opens, the audience is struck in the beginning scenes by the unusual usage of the low angle fisheye lens shot. While the low angle is not maintained throughout the first quarter of the film, the fisheye lens is, and both separately and especially together are cinematographic decisions that boldly position the film as dystopian from the start. Lanthimos, the director of the new feature, is transparent about his desire to place the film in the dystopian category, a category that many of his previous films fall into as well. He says in a recent interview about the process of creating a dystopia: “Generally, there’s not many shots that are at the eye-level of the actors,” and this is true for Poor Things.
My interest was piqued by Poor Things before I even knew what it was about, and I should note that this is rare for someone who is a writer and not a visual artist, but it was the lushness and novelty of the visuals of the film’s trailer that made me remark to myself, Wow, they’re doing something different here. And they did. I can honestly say that I’ve never seen anything quite like Poor Things – it’s stylistically unprecedented. I think that the simplest way to describe the style is as a fusion of two of the major inspirations that Lanthimos cites to the production design team. These two inspirations are the paintings of French Futurist Albert Robida and the mise en scene of Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula. One of the aspects that makes the costumes and sets feel otherworldly and dreamlike is this mixing of a time that has past, the Victorian era, with a time that has yet to be - the future. And yet, we cannot be sure as viewers that this story is set in either the past or the future – we do not know when it is set! This, of course, is part of what makes the film captivating.
I was nervous and uncomfortable when the film began and Ramy Youssef, playing the medical student and surgical assistant Max McCandles, shows up to the Victorian estate at the film’s onset and, taken aback, remarks at Emma Stone’s character, Bella, “What a pretty retard!” But thankfully by the end, my discomfort was thrust to the side, as the closing shot is one of female freedom complete with gin martinis, which I might add have, since the film’s release, been coined the ‘Bella’ gin martini and are being exclusively sold at nightlife hotspots including Dante Beverly Hills and Dante West Village.
Bella Baxter, played by the ever-gorgeous Emma Stone with ever more gorgeous bum-length Raven black hair, has a complicated backstory. Bella was once a pregnant woman named Victoria, who we learn towards the end of the film when her former husband shows up on the scene, was extremely depressed in her former life especially due to her pregnancy. (The general, her former husband, tells Bella at the end of the film that she had called the unborn child, “The Monster.”) This Victoria was so depressed in fact that she threw herself off a bridge - the very first shot of the film. Poor Things, like Lanthimos’ films The Favourite and The Lobster, is a comedy, albeit a dark one. One of the funniest moments of the film, I thought, and one that exemplifies the quality of the film’s dark Victorian comic sensibility, is when the disfigured surgeon, Godwin, or as Bella calls him “God” (also darkly comic), explains the decision after finding Victoria’s unconscious body to transplant the unborn infant’s brain into Victoria’s as “obvious.” He says, and there is a moment of pause before the dialogue is delivered: “It was obvious.” This moment was brilliantly executed. And so, this strange surgical act is what sets the plot in motion and what explains Bella’s “pretty retardedness.”
The film’s narrative is really Bella’s story, a story of her character traversing this near-but-still-far-from reality and developing into her own woman once she leaves the confines of Godwin’s controlling empiricism. Her extremely fast-paced, unrealistic coming-of-age is very funny and pierced with a twisted, dark, and hilarious strain of feminist spirit. Before she takes hedonistic flight with a lover who comes to the estate and preys on the still child-brained, bumbling Bella, she becomes engaged to the medical student Max. Just imagine what a child’s mind trapped inside a woman’s body in a futuristic Victorian setting might look like, as this is what is unfolding here. Easy enough, right? There is much emphasis placed on the depiction of Bella’s sexual awakening, which though again amusing in this context, may have benefited from more subtlety.
A highlight of the film and a detail that marks Lanthimos’ work with a flare of originality are the beautiful Title cards that introduce each chapter of Bella’s journey as she travels through London, Lisbon, and Paris with her lover, Duncan, played by Mark Ruffalo. These cards are an homage to the silent film era and also to the 1930s studio films. In a recent piece in the NY Times Critic’s Notebook entitled “A Crybaby Year for Men in the Movies,” Natalia Winkelman writes on the relationship between Bella and Duncan:
“I am not understanding this complicated feeling,” Bella remarks dispassionately at one point, as Duncan snivels over her sleeping with another man. The line lands as a joke; Duncan’s weepy reaction is entirely uncomplicated. But Bella’s confusion also hits on something real. Duncan doesn’t own Bella, as much as he would like to, and he sees himself as the victim of that reality.”
Taking the lead of Winkelman’s commentary, I would call the film’s feminism surprising. It makes me contemplate the ways in which a dystopia can be used as a powerful modality for social commentary. Had Bella not had the developing brain of a child awakening to her sexuality in the care of a man who shows up to her home and sweeps her away despite a pending engagement on a months-long vacation to nearly-real cities filled with nothing but food and fucking, the delivery of her line of thought “I am not understanding this complicated feeling” and Duncan’s strong reaction to it, would not have had its strange, insightful resonance.
The medical scenes, and there are a lot of them, are not good for the queasy. So, if you plan to see the film (which you should), and you are the queasy type, you had best be prepared to do a lot of looking away. The closing scene, which as I mentioned, has a now full-grown Bella toasting with a gin martini, also has the abusive husband of her former self on all fours due to a goat’s brain transplant. The film is a strangely victorious Victorian fantasy that appears to be doing and saying way more as you reflect on it after its close.
Links to explore:
“How the ‘Poor Things’ Production Designers Turned Yorgos Lanthimos Madcap, Macabre, Ecstatic Vision Into an Oscar Frontrunner”
https://variety.com/2023/artisans/global/poor-things-production-design-hungary-1235763066/
“The Surreal World of Set Designer Shona Heath”
Yorgos Lanthimos: How to Create Disturbing Dystopias
“A Crybaby Year for Men in the Movies”
“Masquerade” by Kit Williams