A gynocentric take on the Frankenstein story, director Yorgos Lanthimos’s satirical new screen spectacle, Poor Things, adapted by Tony McNamara from the late Alasdair Gray’s postmodern 1992 novel and winner of Venice’s Golden Lion award, features a jaw-dropping portrayal of a child-woman like no other. Initially a food-spitting, plate-smashing, carpet-wetting toddler in Emma Stone’s hardly childish body, Bella Baxter must quickly adjust her intellect and verbal skills to match her accelerating libido.
“Yes, Bella starts with a toddler’s mind,” Lanthimos says when I interview him and McNamara, “but she’s evolving so radically fast that we had to be meticulous about the stages of that journey and make sure they were truthful and that she had all the agency in each discovery so she was the one driving the creation of herself. Bella was the one making the film, in a way.”
An overreaching Scottish surgeon (Willem Dafoe, with a fissured Elephant Man face) adopted and named Bella after resurrecting her—a pregnant-suicide case—and equipping her with a new consciousness. The immature lass has just become engaged to Baxter’s apprentice (Ramy Youssef) when the lisping cad Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) seduces her, exactly as Steerforth does Little Em’ly in David Copperfield, and takes her on an extended cosmopolitan tour.
Sadly for him, Wedderburn reckons without Bella’s unquenchable appetites and curiosity and innate compassion for the sick and poor. His inability to master her unmans him.
“Her circumstances give her this freedom that doesn’t abide by any social constrictions or inter-relationships,” Lanthimos says. If you’re like Wedderburn, “her free mind will drive you crazy because your expectations of her behavior are not being met, and I don’t think you can easily find a way to deal with it. Bella is completely unobtainable and always would be unless she’s interested in exploring something.”
Bella is, in other words, a great foil for the sexual braggart Wedderburn’s crippling neurosis—that of the ultra-covetous, slut-shaming male who fears his inadequacy in the sack. “There’s no society in Bella to get its hooks into her,” McNamara says. “And there’s no shame in her, right?”
That’s a key point. Though Poor Things’s intimacy coordinator, Elle McAlpine, was kept busy, the film’s bedroom scenes take their cue from Bella’s untainted attitude to sex. “I’m basically borrowing words from Emma,” Lanthimos says, “but she had to feel no shame about her body because Bella wouldn’t have any, so she dealt with [being nude] similarly to how Bella would deal with it. Emma was very aware of how to do justice to the character.”
Under the surface of its voluptuous fusion of Victorian Gothic, steampunk, Art Deco, and Orientalist décor—the dazzling, kaleidoscopic images mirroring Bella’s emotional education—Poor Things is a feminist fable. The attempt by every man to control Bella, and by Duncan to possess her, founders on the purity of mind and spirit that, as she begins to understand and manage her drives, makes her genuinely heroic.
“In the beginning, I was like, ‘Oh, I shouldn’t be saying—me, as a man—I made a feminist film,’” Lanthimos says. “But then I thought, ‘Why is that bad?’ Isn’t the whole point that men should realize what the hell’s going on and [use] their”—McNamara finishes the thought for him—“their knowledge of female experience? It’s not the same as knowing a woman’s experience internally, but it is the same as living in a society where sex [equals] shame and women’s bodies are apparently political football. I guess there is an idea that men can’t enter that world and speak about it, but I think men can speak about it and understand how, like the satire of the movie, they grow up in a world where a lot of them have an impulse to control women. And men have to contend with that.”
“That’s the whole point,” Lanthimos says. “The goal is that men would perceive that and then they would be feminist and you wouldn’t even have to use the word. It would be natural to everyone that women are considered equal to men and should have the same opportunities. If we retain the divide that men shouldn’t be feminist, or shouldn’t be talking about these issues, then it will always remain. We need to acknowledge the monstrosity of the structures that have been created over hundreds of years. [As men] we need to show ourselves as accepting that. Why shouldn’t we be making feminist films as much as we’re able to?”
Poor Things is in theaters now
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Graham Fuller is a New York–based film critic