STORY & REVIEW
Resurrected by the scientist Dr. Baxter, Bella cruises with a lawyer Duncan across the continents for an adventure seeking liberation.
‘Poor Things‘ is, basically, a novel by Alasdair Gray that he wrote back in 1992. So it is the work of literature that is turned into drama and is technically the most vibrant source of a complex narration. Director Yorgos Lanthimos returns with his usual absurdist form of science-fiction.
‘Poor Things’ is Alice in a Neverland in a kaleidoscopic dream. I tried to make sense from the fictional university of this wonderful cinema but I slipped to nonsense in the name of creativity and Yorgos’ artistry.
In a very advanced Victorian London, Dr. Baxter tests Bella who was pregnant and committed suicide. He brings her back from the dead and gives her her own fetus’s mind by replacing her brain with that of her fetus. With time, Bella shows incredible mental progress. She gets engaged with Dr. Baxter’s assistant Max but after one meeting with the lawyer Duncan, she runs away on a long adventure where she breathes a new world. But during all this, she has no knowledge about what actually happened with her.
The film, with all its mind-blowing technical excellence, mesmerizes me. But the story provokes me to question what exactly is the message of the film. Is it just entertainment? Must I stay disconnected with such an unusual enchantment of a bizarre world?
Unsure about what the novelist or the director wanted with the subject. Maybe we all are on the same page but I think that ‘Poor Things’ has lifted a woman from the floor and showed a harsh reality about how the woman is expected or hoped to exist in the world order. Almost all the men were cruel and unkind to woman. Every man Bella trusted, broke her heart. Dr. Baxter brought her back to life but as a subject. Max had an affection but didn’t reveal the secret of her existence. Duncan used her for pleasure and regretted when he realized what she was. Husband Alfie was a sadist who imprisoned her.
As Bella seeks freedom but on her own terms, ‘Poor Things’ emphasizes on social inequalities. When Duncan loses all his money because of Bella and has no place to live, she sell her soul to repay him. Does he accept? No. When Bella presses for choosing her customers on her own terms, she is told that she is being an idealist but she must give in to the demands of the world. The hard line by her owner is that “Some men enjoy that you do not like it”. Bella’s body is squeezed for pleasure by mostly old men who come in all sizes.
I think ‘Poor Things’ lost the grip in the middle. Particularly, when she joined the brothel. Too much time was stretched over her experience with the customers. I get the point of dramatizing all this but twenty minutes is awful stretch. The story was moving nowhere at this point.
EMMA STONE
Emma Stone stole the show as Bella. The entire body language and facial expressions were terrific. With the brain of a child in an adult woman’s body, Emma left no space in the character. The behavioral attitude was so spot on. Just watch her performance when Bella experiments her first sense of pleasure on the table. When she gets excited over a piece of music in the party and dances wildly. Or when she winks Duncan. Or when she gets furious with the doctor. Or receives the doctor excitedly. Clearly looks to be Emma Stone’s most enthralling performance to date, she was the perfect candidate to win the Oscar for the Best Actress.
CLOSING REMARKS
Poor Things has a storytelling in aesthetics that envisions me if Robert Eggars and Tim Burton had a brunch one day and decided to draw the pictures and set a sequence of the drawings into a story. The visual design of the film is spectacle.
I think ‘Poor Things’ has conveyed the message in a Yorgos way. Even the absurd humor has a strange excitement. I recommend the audience of the abstract and surreal cinema to watch ‘Poor Things’.
RATING 8.5/10
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Sami Naik | Film Critic 