Poor Things

Poor Things - a monstrous, magnificent rebirth. A 21st century essential. A magnum opus.  “What a very pretty ________ !!” (where the comedy lies) Yorgos Lanthimos, I love him. His work I mean. And sometimes I don’t know why. However, Poor Things is without a doubt a cinematic marvel: a feral, baroque fantasia that reconstructs the Frankenstein myth through a radically feminist lens. Yorgos keeps doing Lanthimos things. This time, he stepped foot on the summit of Everest. In this maximalist odyssey of grotesquerie and grace, he delivers a genre-defying exploration of autonomy (anything unlike Cronenberg’s calm movements), desire (overpowering in all sorts), and the violence of social conditioning. He realises this is his breakthrough - a charming aesthetic world; lush, absurd, and unrepentantly alive.  [ 96 ] At his curiosity-containing core is Bella Baxter, played by Emma Stone with unguarded brilliance and visceral courage. Resurrected by the experimental hand of God-like scientist, literally named Dr Godwin (Willem Dafoe), Bella begins as a ‘tabula rasa’ and evolves into an unshackled seeker of pleasure, intellect, and liberation. Her journey is framed by Victorian, more or less steampunk opulence and explicit comedy, whereby it lays bare the paradox of freedom in a society obsessed with control. Lanthimos fools with the divine. His creativity bursts out of surgical experimentation while Bella glimpses the world through the body of her dead-self, obtaining a peculiar taste of the afterlife in a continuing timeline, amidst the childish chaos of her infant’s brain. Blood-for-Blood. Prior patriarchal abuse for a sense of family, and a woman’s personal ode to self-discovery.  Male entitlement is dead obvious. Constant brag about physical property, females are caged in, their bodies not theirs to keep. Ruffalo’s Duncan Wedderburn - WOW. I’m terribly impressed, since I do have vendetta against the guy. See, he underperforms often and drags the movies down by a bar. But he is gaudy as a ‘poor thing’ and gruesome as a ‘bully of poor things’. He is glitter, the pompous and cartoonishly performative type, in which he embodies the farcical extremes of male ego. The art of taking advantage. His theatrical courtship cascades down into baby rage when Bella experiences growth and maturity. Holy shit, Mark goes bonkers in deliberate hamminess, a self-aware buffoonery that further accentuates Bella’s enlarging possession of her own skin and flesh, most crucially a confused entity.  Mother or child (?) It does not matter because she represents the female league. The ending displays her resilience, her newly found wit, her self-fashioned existence. She chose not to obey the rules, she paved her own path, not in the prettiest way, but the ‘poor thing’ in her is gone. Lanthimos served up his most cohesive, bombastic, and visionary work to date.  ————————————————————————————— How Yorgos perfects his style is amusing. I could compare the ambitious Megalopolis to this masterpiece in terms of the bold look that doesn’t fit in the past 2 decades. He already learns and applies a fond cultivation that disorients and distorts and does the impossible by making unconventional ‘Wes-Anderson-esque’ visuals appeal to the mainstream audience. Especially since Gen Z’s are not eyed to appreciate art like this anymore, I was surprised to see how well-received Poor Things turned out to be. The tilting cities is a 3-pointer visual aspect, it just captures the early perception of Bella’s underdeveloped eyes. Meanwhile, Yorgos throws in a lot of motion blur and vignetting, highlighting the surreal vibe. It has the impressionistic oil painting slush, the overstimulating, artificial, fantasy book set pieces that invites me to meander. The dialogue, quirky, comedic, elegant, poetic, at times hideous. But that’s the point no? Here comes the design. Whorehouse supreme is oddly colorful, and packed with weird details. The ship is mesmerising, Dr Godwin’s estate is remarkably put together, more fancy in the 1930s style monochrome, later of course, exposing with greens and stitched up animal hybrids. Science amongst the deep cut of cinema. The haters are allowed to hate all they want. It won’t change a thing.