6. Poor Things, dir. Yorgos Lanthimos
Let me be clear: I respect Yorgos Lanthimos as a director and an artist. However, I would never let him around my children. Just like I wouldn't want to date Charlie Kaufman, and I don't want to be a mother to Ari Aster. These directors might be very nice people in real life, their artistic output is great, but they also legitimately disturb me. Yorgos Lanthimos is blossoming as a creator. He's becoming more and more Yorgos Lanthimos with every movie, much like Wes Anderson how has kept doubling-down on the Wes Anderson-y-ness over the last decade. On the other hand, Lanthimos is obsessed with a pre-pubescent sexuality, especially our discomfort with such topics. The Killing of a Sacred Deer is completely intolerable if you do not want to hear preteens talk frankly about their body changes. I have not had the courage to watch Dogtooth, that might be too much for me.
Poor Things is also a heck of a lot.
Lanthimos actually made an extreme swerve towards "normalcy" with The Favourite, a mostly-lucid period piece whose strangest details were a goose chase and some wacky dances. Poor Things feels like the punchline to The Favourite's set-up. "Oh, you thought I was transitioning into respectability? Oh no no no no no, here's a naked Emma Stone getting fucked by an ugly French man." Poor Things is another film set in the stuffy elegance of European high society, only now the psycho-sexual issues are louder and prouder than ever before. The artifice is also much more apparent than before. Most of the movie is shot on sound stages before fantasy backgrounds with airships and impossible paintery backgrounds. The whole cast is American actors cast trying on posh British accents. Frankenstein's monster is here as Dr. Godwin (Willem Dafoe), with a horrifying cubist face. Yeah, no, Lanthimos is not getting boring on us.
Also, Poor Things is effectively a Robert A. Heinlein SciFi concept, asking "what if you put an infant's brain in an adult body, and it got horny?" This sounds fairly reprehensible, maybe it is. I think Lanthimos handles this better than Heinlein would have. Poor Things makes a compelling argument in its favor, and it wants to shock. I would not recommend
you go to the movies with your mom to see Poor Things, let us say that much.
Godwin is the second-generation of a family of experimental surgeons, who have a talent for grafting things together. His home is full of little duck-goats and dog-chickens wandering around. Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) is "God"'s latest creation, a young woman with the brain of her own unborn child implanted in her skull. Around the time Bella learns to masturbate with an apple, Poor Things is off to races with its explicit content and never stops. The sexual awakening is played just like Dorothy crashing into Munchkin Land, with an opening black and white section traded for color. That's when Poor Things fully unleashes its wild imagination of world full of unreal majesty, and also many unflattering nude men.
Bella is too adult to not act out her urges, but also too childish to know shame. So the entirety of Victorian - or really any era's - sexual politics are just fully illogical to her. Sex, it turns out, is her passion in multiple ways, it becomes her art. She confounds her foppish cad of a first lover, Duncan Wedderburn (a very hammy Mark Ruffalo) by simply not allowing him any possession over her and refusing any responsibility for his emotions - which are all his, after all. Prostitution, promiscuity, bisexuality, why not? Nobody has a good answer, except their own discomfort. Bella is in some ways, more adult about these issues than even we are. "Shame" is a negative emotion, it is bad. In basically every way it is self-destructive, allowing fear of judgment to eradicate parts of yourself. Bella is free from that. So she fucks her way around Europe, learns many things, and comes home wiser for the experience. Poor Things is like if Terry Gilliam made an Emmanuelle movie, only better.
Bella gets to be God's loving daughter and successor. And Poor Things ends on a very Lanthimosian conclusion of putting a goat's brain in a jackass human's body. Lanthimos is gonna keep getting weirder, you better watch out.
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