It is sickly hilarious to make a movie in which so much consensual sex is had, often so gleefully, that is not the least bit sexy. Though Bella Baxter’s insatiable libido might be her guiding light at first in Poor Things, sexual liberation (or “furious jumping,” as she calls it) is only part of this fantastical, anarchic journey to consciousness.
Filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos and his star, Emma Stone, have a good and strange thing going whether she’s playing a striving scullery maid who works her way into the favour of Queen Anne, or a reanimated Victorian woman finding independence. Stone helps make his black humour more accessible, and he creates unorthodox opportunities for her to play and stretch. We, the audience, are the benefactors.
Poor Things was not a whole-cloth invention. It is an adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel, done by The Favourite screenwriter Tony McNamara whose edges and wit haven’t dulled and in fact flourishes outside the cruelty of the previous film. Don’t worry, the humour is plenty dark here, but self-actualisation looks good on them.
In this depraved and not-so-subtle fairytale, men see Bella as a thing to possess and control. Her creator, Dr Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), a mad scientist with violent scars all over his face from a childhood as test subject for his own father, wants to hide her away from the corrupting influences of the world. His horrified student Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), enlisted to study Bella, wants her to be his wife. And the dandy attorney Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) sees a sex doll, someone with the potential to be as wild and adventuresome as him and eschew the conventional stuffiness of their time. Everyone assumes Bella will not be too much of a problem. And everyone is wrong.
It wouldn’t be a Lanthimos movie without some immense, irreconcilable discomfort, like using a highly sexualised woman with the mind of a toddler for comedic purposes. But this is hardly the first fairytale to exploit its heroine for her innocence or naivete. Does it make it better if that’s the point? Is it making light of second-degree rape? Is it the film’s responsibility to answer to? Or is this the prickly post-film debate that everyone is supposed to be having? That is something only the individual can answer.
