Poor Things

So begins the year 2024. A true hagiography of female sexual freedom, Poor Things is a work full of humor with a refined image texture and extremely rich colors which punctuates the fundamental principles of feminism in an atmosphere of a retrofuturistic 19th century London overlooked by a landscape with overdone and kitsch decorations as possible. We then follow the initiatory journey of a being just born - just created rather - with an adult body but with a partial and childish idiom who grows up in a cloistered house. This backward creature with reduced mobility must learn to appropriate the language, customs and conventions of a society of which it knows nothing except the dogmatism present around its spiritual father, called the "God". A doctor with disconcerting and picturesque methods operating under the yoke of a traumatic education but the foundation of his genius (main guinea pig of a heartless father, he will not however escape a few touches of humanity: "always incised with compassion" ). Bella is a scientific experiment that tests humanity. Her confinement is akin to the preamble to life, a place where she discovers the conveniences of language (to greet someone it is better to shake their hand than to hit them in the face), the gustatory joys of the palate (there are foods that we like, others that disappoint us), the principle of chaos (throw a plate on the ground, it will explode into a thousand pieces), human physical fragility (bodies which are injured and dissected by the dozens following disconcertingly fluid incisions) or even the nervous reactivity of her vagina (not only by her hands but also with fruit or by the hands of a foreign body). Once the childhood phase is over, it is now time for Bella to explore the new world. The inauguration of his tribulations is distinguished in the symbolic crossing of the walls of his birthplace, imbuing him with the notion of decision, gently announcing to him the extent of his free will. And if his gustatory and sexual discoveries continue to emancipate themselves without firing a shot through local tastings (this term designating both the typical dishes of the country and the coital performances of Duncan Wedderburn), it is indeed the learning of philosophical reflection and the observation of social inequality which will hit Bella Baxter's recently acquired consciousness hard. Babies die while adults gorge themselves on food. The decay of human ethics is total. The parenthesis of trauma has passed, the appearance of compassion has taken place and the character of Emma Stone (who, moreover, delivers an EXCEPTIONAL performance fully deserving of capital letters) continues her initiatory country trip. Finally master of the wanderings of her body and the wanderings of her thoughts, she stops in a brothel, an emblematic temple of adultery. This inevitable stopping leaves room for the dichotomy of good and evil, spirit and flesh, pleasure and pain, ethics and depravity. And if she was surprised by the disconcerting evidence of pleasure at the beginning of her bodily experiments ("look, did you know that?" she said to her servant, spontaneously grabbing her crotch), she would discover in this educational institution all the plethora of sexual excesses: whether it be uninteresting relationships of three thrusts, sessions involving role play, the association of the act with tenderness (she gets to know her client and, by therefore, little by little discovers the intimate), relationships which hurt (but which bring, astonishment, a misunderstood sensation of enjoyment), the possibility of doing it with women or even a release from ancient Greek pederasty (the father teaching his sons how to procreate). Some spectators will also have to put their chauvinism aside in order to fully laugh at the representation that is made of the French of this era, as ugly as they are immoral, as pathetic as they are repulsive. Despite a completed sexual apprenticeship and a total emancipation of her ilk, Bella Baxter will quickly be overtaken by an inevitable immurement. SPOILER First by her marriage to link her to Max McCandless, then by her former husband coming back from the dead, or rather coming back to look for the dead woman. SPOILER Alfie Blessington's home reflects not only Bella's childhood but also the regimentation of society. A violent masculine society ("Jesus Christ himself would smash your skull") wanting to control everything to the point of removing the clitoris, symbol of pleasure, femininity, identity. We will also notice that not for a single moment is the theme of menstruation broached in the footage. Is blood already so abundant in the film that it alone is enough to represent this omnipresent and essential ovulatory scourge of reproduction? Does the director consider that the importance of the emancipatory message rests in part on female pleasure and that it would therefore be inappropriate to represent what is anything but pleasure? You be the judge. Having just come out of his morbid and necrophilic Bleat, Yórgos Lánthimos dissects, in his new production awarded at the Mostra, with surgical precision not inert corpses but the relationship of a woman - Women - to a patriarchal and heterogeneous world which was and still is too problematic, too stigmatizing, too conservative of the mysogynist principles of yesteryear. This surreal black comedy benefits from both impressive acting (if Emma Stone totally absorbs the screen, we cannot miss the performance of Willem Daffoe, Mark Ruffalo, Ramy Youssef, Christopher Abbott or Kathryn Hunter) but above all a meticulous and breathtaking production accentuated by its assertive green backgrounds, its retro plasticity, its thoughtful use of black and white and its effective technical processes (notably this rare but magical “Fish-eye”). The peroration of this feminist panegyric presents in a peaceful momentum a final liberating scene of the taking of power of a poor creature, devoid of her "God", having crossed limits, ages, death, life, pain and pleasure, becoming mistress of the place where she was created, sunglasses on her nose, cocktail in hand.