Writer: Tony McNamara
Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
With several films at this year’s BFI London Film Festival channelling Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, including opening gala Saltburn, the final weekend is a chance to see Poor Things, Lanthimos’ own contribution to the event. Like a giant Victorian novel coming to life on screen, this visionary director applies science fiction tropes and 50s high stakes melodrama to fascinating effect in this adaption of Alasdair Gray’s book, a tale of human construction, travel and sexual desire that examines female oppression.
A scientific experiment conducted by surgeon Goodwin Baxter know as ‘God’, Bella Baxter is made from the brain of a baby in the body of her own dead mother who learns to grow at an astonishing rate. A sexual awakening soon follows with a desire to see the world, and despite an engagement to Baxter’s medical student, Bella takes off with a lover who wants to posses her. Yet Bella discovers she has little empathy and a growing independent streak that chooses a path for her.
Lanthimos’ combination of styles actually creates a quite distinct and consistently realised world that visually blends bold and exaggerated Victoriana in locations and costume with a Tim Buton-like fantasy that provides real onscreen spectacle. To this, the director adds an equally heightened 50s black and white melodrama with jagged musical accompaniment scored by Jerskin Fendrix to represent the initial confinement and control applied to Bella’s world by the men who seek to control her, with liberal application of fisheye lenses and roundels to keep her knowledge small.
And female control is the film’s major theme as a series of unsuitable and undeserving men try to cage her innocence and her allure – a medieval classification of women as angels or prostitutes that Bella actually lives. This manifests as physical prisons in hotel rooms and on ships as well as a need to restrict her physical and intellectual desires. That Bella rebels against all of this is part of her character growth, her developing imagination and experience of life allowing her to think beyond the simplistic two-dimensional creature that men want her to be and to evolve instead into a pragmatic, rations being open to life and capable of making and surviving her own choices.
The science-fiction element of the film places Bella in the position of Frankenstein’s monster, a childlike simplicity that assimilates and expands but asks big questions about the right to control human and animal biology at will. Baxter’s multiple experiments splicing together a pig and a chicken, a swan and a tiny dog are amusing but the act of creating Bella and re-animating a woman who chose death adds an interesting ethical dilemma, and generates a late-stage examination of the different identities the woman possesses and how much she even knows about herself.
Emma Stone is wonderful in the central role, odd and withdrawn, blunt and often hilariously callous as an Eliza Doolittle figure learning how to behave and rejecting the models established for her by men, while Willem Defoe is suitably grandiose as the tortured but devoted scientist.
No one creates worlds like Lanthimos, and this ambitious life story of desire and self-discovery is a late Festival highlight.
Poor Things is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2023.
