YORGOS LANTHIMOS: POOR THINGS (2023) - NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL


EMMA STONE AND MARK RUFFALO IN POOR THINGS

Bawdy, supremely visual period genre exploration of human possibility, and triumph for Emma Stone

Lanthimos' latest film, the big winner at the Venice Film Festival, is a sort of bonkers reworking of the Frankenstein myth with a female re-creation. This is even more of a critical success than its predecessor, The Favourite, maybe not more of a popular success. It's more offensive to common taste and values than the latter. But it demands attention and delights the eye with its beautiful and distinctive mise-en-scène and use of locations, and it lives and breathes though an adept and go-for-broke performance by Emma Stone in the lead role. It's ultimately wearying, too much of a good, or delightfully bad, thing, but it has a "look" that never falters in being impressively consistent throughout. Lanthimos has grown in skill and appeal from film to film and this is a peak, a fluent and bold tour de force that astonishes and delights as much as it offends and provides a gloriously visual realization of an interesting tale.

Everything is set in the nineteenth century when there were carriages: one of them early on is memorably drawn by a what is only the stuffed head of a horse, one of many signals that everything is a little bit off-kilter. This is a time, it is assumed, when science and medicine are at liberty to play wildly with nature. Hence a well-off woman drops off a bridge and drowns and Willem Dafoe's doctor-surgeon Dr. Godwin Baxter, with a heavily scarred face (an elaborate feat of prosthetics and makeup) and a seemingly plausible Scottish accent (perhaps an homage to the late Alastair Gray on whose book this film is based) reanimates the drowned lady's body with the help of a lot of electricity together with surgical insertion of a fresh baby's brain. Voilà! A mature woman with long raven tresses and the unformed mind and undeveloped motor skills of a child.

What follows is a sort of around the world in a crazy eighty days during which Bella Baxter, as the doctor has named his creation - and he has her call him "God" - grows with astonishing rapidity from a rude, balletic non-person who spits out food, boxes people and babies in the face, and is as dependent and worshiping toward him as an Irish setter to its master, to a lady who reads books and thinks and manipulates men as she likes.

The panache with which Emma Stone performs in this role is a delight, beginning with her inventive and original choreography of a body learning to balance and move. A lot of Lanthimos' action however, and often the writing attributed to Alasdair Gray and The Favourite coscriptor Tony McNamara, is as much gratuitously crude and silly at times as it is bold. The childish provocations sometimes distract from what might be possible insights.

And yet we should begin with the settings and look, which in turn begin with the use of a fisheye lens that rounds and expands everything, whether interior or exterior, providing a quaint, painterly, and quite beautiful look, sometimes in black and white, more often in color.

Meanwhile Bella's development is largely framed around sex. She discovers early the delights of self-pleasure, and couples with one man who uses, and then repentantly loves, her, Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo, whose posh English accent is tongue-in-cheek), and another man, a student of the doctor, who reveres and is betrothed to her, Max McCandless (Ramy Youssef). Bella is a free woman though, and even her experiences of a Parisian brothel - elaborately realized, including a memorable interior seen from above, is an energetic, cooly intellectual exploration of possibilities, and way of making money.

Lanthimos has graduated from "dour, deadpan little tales," as Stephanie Zacharek puts it in her understandably admiring Time review, that show how cruel man can be as if we needed to know, to things that are "more wickedly cheerful and bawdy." This may still be seen as a mixed blessing, except that he has also simply grown enormously as a filmmaker along with the opening up of mood. Poor Things is more challenging as a project and frankly magnificent - you can call it show-offy if you like - than anything he has done before. Movies are about visuals, after all; this film is very much that, and also has a plot. It could have done with less vulgarity, tempered its violence, and edited out twenty to thirty unnecessary or repetitive minutes. But one no longer cringes at the prospect but instead now anticipates with pleasure what Lanthimos will do next.

A standout of the year and Oscar-worthy in many categories, as pointed out by YouTube's "The Oscar Expert," "brother bro," and a female Lanthimos fan guest in their Oct. 18, 2023 review. It now may rank with and even exceed Oppenheimer in awards season.

Poor Things,141 mins., debuted at Venice Sept. 1, 2023, where it won the Golden Lion for best film. It was subsequently scheduled for a great many international festivals, including the NYFF, where it was screened for this review and shown Sept. 30, 2023. Metacritic rating: 9̶4̶%̶. 87%.


EMMA STONE IN POOR THINGS

_________________
©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.