After sex there is a risk of getting bored. At least for Bella Baxter (Emma Stone). Image: keystone
Revision
The new film of the crazy Greek Yorgos Lanthimos successfully makes its way into the awards season. The second Oscar after “La La Land” for Emma Stone is probably certain.
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Anyone who has ever read Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” knows how much you can love a monster. How much one feels and suffers when Frankenstein’s creature, made of corpses, gradually comes to his senses and desperately tries to move among people, even if they only feel fear and disgust. And like the monster, with the miserable existence given to him by a megalomaniacal scientist, he eventually becomes vengeful. He is perhaps the poorest outcast in the history of literature. A poor thing. A poor thing.
Greek Yorgos Lanthimos tells his Frankenstein story differently. For him the eponymous “Poor Things” are only partly deplorable. Because his monsters develop to a level surprisingly superior to human, even superhuman.
That monster isn’t actually one, it just looks like one. London doctor Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), God for short, is himself the son of a doctor. As in the case of his father, everything living is for him a possible object of empirical research. He himself was his father’s favorite research subject, his material body for several experiments that damaged him forever. Inside and outside. His broken face scares people. That’s why he dares to approach them only in the classroom and at his house.
The house, in turn, is a paradise of what is humanly possible and its expressive form is collage: she has put together her pets of different species, they are so to speak Moitié-Moitié, on which she is sitting, for example, a goose head the body of a dog and barks at itself. The decor is wilder steampunk, Victorian looking retro-futurism, beautiful, a fairytale in itself. Expanding Art Nouveau with significant organic forms meets all kinds of curious machines. The sky is populated by Dadaist, floating objects.
God (Willem Dafoe) can only feed himself with the help of a complicated machine. His father’s experiments are to blame. Image: keystone
God’s greatest creation, however, is Bella Baxter, a precocious-minded young woman, a suicidal woman whom Baxter pulled out of the Thames, planted the brain of her unborn child in her head and – as Dr. Frankenstein says – revived with electricity. Bella is beautiful, only a scar on her neck reveals her surgery. And Bella’s fetal brain is developing rapidly: she has just learned to speak, now she is discovering her sexuality and she wants to masturbate at every inappropriate opportunity.
At that point it’s clear why “Poor Things” was placed in the “Best Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy” category at the Golden Globes (and won), because “Poor Things” is incredibly funny, bizarre and always wonderfully surprising, the final lines unexpected and original. And Emma Stone (she also won a Golden Globe) is a miracle. As is known, she was already in “Birdman”, “La La Land” and above all in “The Favourite” (also by Lanthimos), where she competed with Rachel Weisz for the favor of a stubborn, greedy and vomiting queen (Olivia Colman ).
Review on «La Favorita»
Emma Stone is wild as Bella Baxter. A storm on screen with waist-length black hair. But Bella doesn’t allow anything else. Because Bella is a woman who lacks many of the things that society would like to impose on her: boundaries, fear, inhibitions, a sense of shame. Bella is a completely shameless person. When she finds satisfaction in something – sex, food, alcohol, dancing – she binges on it like a child.
Lanthimos and Stone take a nice break from filming a very uncomfortable scene. Image: keystone
The plan is for her to marry one of God’s assistants and remain with him forever in God’s estate. Protected, guarded, imprisoned in a prison of love. He convinces her to first take a trip into the world and sex with bon vivant Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo). He should stick out his horns, as young people did before marriage. Of course, this isn’t as easy as Wedderburn imagined, because Bella is a walking imposition in everything.
The journey takes you from Lisbon to Alexandria to Paris; For Bella it becomes not only an erotic and educational journey, because the next thing that strikes her like lightning is her intellect. And on the blank paper of their conscience a sharp and omniscient mind gradually emerges that knows how to penetrate and manipulate the world as the scalpels of God and His Father do with human and animal bodies. Luckily for us, morality isn’t a factor that Bella really cares about.
Lisbon – as charming and fantastically stitched together as everything in “Poor Things”. Image: Searchlight Pictures
The fifty-year-old Lanthimos is a director who makes his actors act in a completely different way, as in the case of Olivia Colman in “The Favourite” or Barry Keoghan, Nicole Kidman and Colin Farrell in “The Killing of a Sacred Deer”. His stars can be more eccentric and physical than usual, which is a bit reminiscent of the tactics of the Swiss theater director Christoph Marthaler. And the stars love Lanthimos for it and he loves them back. He calls Emma Stone his official muse, she is like the electricity that brings his creations to life, and he wants to make many more films with him.
Emma Stone and Yorgos Lanthimos at the Governors Awards in Los Angeles on January 9. The triumph of his film began in autumn 2023 when it won the Golden Lion for best film in Venice. Image: www.imago-images.de
“Poor Things” is – even more than “The Favorite” – a completely crazy and bombastic cinematic experience. The images alone are a pure, intoxicating gift, after a few moments you have completely emptied your visual memory and can absorb all its splendor like an amazed child. And, giddily, it follows Bella’s strange journey from a clumsy, put-together organism to an almost flexible character that is always highly comical in her analytical thoroughness. Frankenstein’s monster is alive. And he’s happy.
“Povere Cose” runs from January 18th. at Cinema.
Elon Musk has made it clear in the past what he thinks about the drug. For example, in 2018 he achieved great public success with a joint as part of the podcast “The Joe Rogan Experience”. Now report it The “Wall Street Journal” reports that high-ranking employees of Tesla & Co. are worried about the billionaire because he is said to be using LSD, ketamine and magic mushrooms en masse.
2024-01-14 16:50:45
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