I really wasn’t looking forward to seeing Poor Things. I’ve always been quite taken in by Yorgos Lanthinmos’ surreal cinema – the blindfolds and juddering movements, and razor-sharp observational dark comedy – but something about Emma Stone’s pale startled face under those bushy dark eyebrows in the poster was too close to the bone for my liking. I’d read the reviews, jousting it out as to whether a film, made by a straight, white, middle aged man, about the sexual awakening of a child-brained creature could ever be feminist had left this terrible taste in my mouth. Of course it can’t, I parroted back to the various deconstructions of every morsel of Yorgos Lanthimos’ surreal, Victoriana Grand Tour. Sure, I, like everyone else respected Emma Stone’s talent as an actor and agency as a Producer on the film, but this was basically a 70s porn plot, right?
‘I just watched it at face value,’ laughed one of my female friends as I wrung my hands over whether to give up two and a half hours of my hard-pressed time to go to the cinema, ‘I got swept up in the costumes, and the scenery and the madness. I loved it.’
And of course, as soon as the off-kilter soundtrack boinked into action, and black and white fisheye lens swooped about the surrealist masterpiece of a setting, I was hooked. Yes, I’m now a mother of two, pulling my hair out about the frightening potentials of online harassment and sexual violence that await my five year-old daughter’s knowledge in years to come, but I’m also the girl who had a poster of Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange hung beside my bed from the age of 16. I’m not afraid of a bit of the old in out, in out.
And teenage me would have been quite obsessed with this film. It touches on my very particular set of foibles: absolute oddball performances, late 1800s European architecture, Gothic horror and films with French bits and lots of sex scenes. I wasn’t a simple character.
And neither is Bella Baxter. And as much as, yes, I completely rail against the absolute who’s who of middle-aged white men in command of the whole charade (did we know that screenwriter Tony Macnamara started his career writing Martine McCutcheon soap Echo Beach?), it is in its essence about a girl being tossed through the eddies of the world’s male sexual possessiveness and finding herself and her own power within it. There’s at least a pearl in there somewhere. Plus, can we throw back some props to the puppet-mistress behind it all, Mary Shelley who, let’s face it, originated the whole Frankenstein notion to start with, before Alasdair Gray came and mansplained it with the book this is based on in 1992.
Poor Things is a riotous romp. I watched it in a North London cinema full of fifty-something women, very much in command of their own show, and they did nothing but laugh at the darkness and the gruesome truisms. As someone who watches daily as my 16 month-old pieces together language and motion, I was bowled over by Emma Stone’s enrapturing toddler-like performance. Yet I was watching from behind my hands as she discovers pleasure – chastened as the moralising Victorian folk who shrouded table legs with linen cloths because their phallic shape was seen as too sexually provocative (I was thrilled that the production designer thought to dress the Baxters’ dining table in the sheerest gossamer, I’m guessing for this very reason). Nothing is out of bounds in Bella’s mind, apart from the world outside the front door.
Beyond that first foray with fruit, and the curiously-enunciated cad ‘Duncan Wedderburn’ turning up to have a pinch of this woman-child, as Bella’s knowledge grows as exponentially as her hair, I became less concerned at her vulnerability and more hooked on her voraciousness. Her desire for learning matches that desire for the ‘furious jumping’ she’s apparently propelled on this adventure by. And it’s quite the adventure, gorging on Lisbon’s delicacies until she’s sick, before she’s literally packed into a box (a visual metaphor Barbie also toyed with), and eventually being down and out in Paris – which in the Victorian times led to only one place for a woman: the brothel.
Ultimately, this is a film made by a man directing a woman to show how men seek to direct the lives of women. And Emma Stone’s Bella cottons on to that fact almost as quickly as she realises dour-faced Miss Prim could do with a bit of cucumber-induced happiness – women don’t really need men. Which is why the patriarchy seeks so heavily to keep us down, or at very least to pay themselves the box-office takings by pointing it out to us. It might not be a feminist film, but it’s definitely true to life.
