Director: Yorgos Lanthimos (Ireland, UK. USA). Year of Release: 2023
A woman with long black hair and a blue dress viewed from behind. As the camera pulls back, we sense that she is standing on a very high bridge. Down, somewhere in the distance, there is water or something. Suddenly, she raises her arms and moves forward. She plunges into the abyss below.
After the opening titles roll, we see the back of another woman – or maybe the same one – struggling to play chords on a piano. She uses both her hands and her feet, and the sound that she produces is ugly and discordant. Bella Baxter has the body of a woman but the brain and coordination of a child. She is literally the creation of Godwin Baxter, a scientist who is a father figure to her.
Our early experiences of Bella are those of a child. She sulks, is unreasonable, and smashes plates until she is allowed to get her own way. Her vocabulary is limited and she is unable to formulate full sentences, as if she were speaking English as a foreign language. Bella is reluctant to use adjectives or adverbs, preferring a form of baby talk. When she is unable to control her bowels, she just pisses herself in public, much to the embarrassment of her more prurient companions.
Godwin shares a name with William Godwin, anarchist thinker, husband of Mary Wollstonecraft (you may know me for A Vindication of the Rights of Women), and father of Mary Shelley (ditto, Frankenstein). Bella calls him “God” (father of Jesus of Nazareth). People who are interested in symbolism are being given big hints here. God’s face shares the scars of Frankenstein’s monster – he is both an experimenter and someone who has been experimented on.
One thing is clear from the start: there are serious problems with the power relationship between God and Bella. God cares for his creation, but he also controls her, refusing to let her leave his house. Unable to take full sexual control over Bella – he is physically unable to have sex – Godwin picks one of his students, Max McCandles, to monitor her behaviour. McCandles is eager to gain his teacher’s approval, especially after he falls in love with Bella and asks her to marry him.
McCandles’s relationship with Bella is much nicer, but no less controlling. God approves their imminent union, but only if the pair remain in God’s secluded home. McCandles envisages a traditional marriage, which most certainly cannot be preceded by any sex. Bella, who has been shielded from bourgeois morality, has quite different ideas. She has just discovered masturbation (“Bella discover happy when she want”), and would like more of that sort of thing.
Eventually, God reveals Bella’s backstory. The woman we saw in the opening scene, who jumped into the river, was Bella’s suicidal mother. She did not survive, but the foetus in her womb did. God transplanted the foetus’s brain into its mother’s head, which helps explain Bella’s initial childishness and lack of coordination (although critics who claim that Bella is infantilised throughout the film seem to have missed a key plot point).
Bella is whisked off from her boring fiancé by Duncan Wedderburn (excellently played by Mark Ruffalo), a man for whom the words “bounder” and “cad” were invented. As Wedderburn takes Bella to Lisbon, the film changes from monochrome to full colour. Even while Wedderburn is trying to restrict Bella’s imagination, her horizons are expanding and soon she has no more use for her louche lover.
Because of Bella’s peculiar upbringing, she has no time for accepted convention. Before she flees God’s house, she implores Max to “touch each other’s genital pieces!” and spends happy time in her bedroom “working on myself to get happiness.” Her liaison with Wedderburn encourages her to seek out new forms of “furious jumping.” For all Wedderburn’s boasts that he is the world’s greatest lover, you sense that she is much better at this than he is.
In Lisbon, Wedderburn tries to restrict Bella’s self-expression, insisting that she only use the phrases How “marvellous,” “Delighted” and “How do they make the pastry.” For all Wedderburn’s pretensions towards rebellion, he is outraged about the way in which she refuses to conform to the expectations of polite society. There follows some slapstick scenes which some may find a bit obvious. All I can say is that I found them both transgressive and hilarious.
As Bella’s intelligence and social capabilities are growing at an exponential rate, she quickly learns that she doesn’t need men, and certainly not a man like Wedderburn. He has to kidnap Bella to take her to Alexandria, but she briefly takes up with Harry Astley (“The Cynic”) – an underwritten part which is hopefully more rounded in the book, as this part of Bella’s adventure left me slightly cold, Bella ends up, as you do, working in a Parisian brothel to pay the rent.
Poor Things contains many scenes using extreme shots with a fish eye lens to remind us that this is Un Film de Yorgos Lanthimos. If the weird camerawork echoes The Favourite, the hybrid creatures who roam God’s estate – half chicken and bulldog or duck and goat carry the ridiculousness and sense of fun of The Lobster. Above all, it is imbued with Lanthimos’s enjoyment of the bizarre. “Look”, it seems to be telling us, “this is not real. It’s a fairy tale. Stop taking it too seriously.”
There have been some complaints that the film loses some of the subtleties of the original book, by Alasdair Gray. Having not read the book, I can only speculate, but Lanthimos’s explanation that he ditched some of the Scotland-specific parts because he’s Greek and is not the right person to do this is plausible. If you want the Scottish bits, then read the book. The film is trying to do something else, as is its right.
A more telling criticism is that Lanthimos drops some of the film’s politics. While it is true that Bella does meet Leftists when she is working as a prostitute, this is very perfunctory. A fellow prostitute is a socialist, and we see them departing for a socialist meeting – but never arriving. Yes, Bella justifies her work in the brothel (should she even have to?) by saying that “we are our own means of production.”, but this is played more for laughs than as a serious article.
Having said this, one thing that many critics haven’t mentioned is just how funny Poor Things is. It is packed with one-liners and sight gags – like God’s horseless carriage which has a real horse’s head at the front. Don’t worry if you don’t like that joke, there’ll be another one along in a minute. None of which is to say that the film is superficial – the gags come on top of the profound engagement with the world and the beautiful scenery.
Poor Things is not a socialist film, not really, but should this really be the criterion used to decide whether it is Any Good? For all its frivolity, it does make some valid points about the way in which women’s voices are suppressed. As Emma Stone said in an interview: “the more agency Bella gets, the more she learns and grows, the more it drives these men insane.” And surely any film which contains the line “I must go punch that baby” deserves a watch.
Second viewing – March 2024
Continuing my pre-Oscars trawl through the films which are unlikely to win much but would do much better in a fairer world. We’re now onto Poor Things which divided my friends. I’m still on the pro- side, but can see why people might take against it. Anyway, here are some random thoughts after seeing it again.
It’s not a feminist manifesto. So what?
Way too much ink has been spilt in pointless arguments about whether Poor Things is a Great Feminist Film. No it isn’t (nor was Barbie for that matter, but that’s a quite different story), but that’s not the point. I’ve forgotten now who it was who first made the claim, but whoever it was was confusing a film whose leading character is a strong woman (which is rare enough) with one which is offering a head on challenge to the patriarchy.
This is not to say that Poor Things doesn’t get some punches in. The male characters are increasingly horrific as the film goes on, and with the possible exception of the passive Max McCandles, they are all controlling and manipulative. Even God, who Bella adores, refuses to let her escape his house and apparently only does not attempt to take advantage of her sexually because of physical incapability.
There are accusations that the film is anti-feminist, partly because it shows sex workers, less credibly because it shows a woman enjoying sex. I think there are 2 dangers in films and books about sex work – one is to blame women for taking part in sexual transactions, the other is to glorify prostitution as something subversive in and of itself. I think that Poor Things walks this tightrope quite skilfully. Others clearly did not.
And it’s certainly not glorifying paedophilia
The other argument which came up time and time again is that because Bella has a child’s brain at the beginning of the film, and because Bella has sex, the film is depicting and maybe even glorifying paedophilia. There are a couple of problems with this argument. Firstly, we learn explicitly that Bella’s brain power is expanding at a much quicker rate than most people, and by the middle of the film she is reading and quoting Emerson and holding sophisticated discussions.
When McCandles proposes to Bella, she is still childish and probably not really capable of giving consent. But he is insistent on no sex before marriage, and, besides which, he is hardly being portrayed as a paragon of virtue. The last time at which Bella is possibly mentally under age is when she gets drunk in Lisbon, though it’s hardly only people below the age of majority who go all incoherent when they’re pissed.
For the rest of the film, Bella is perfectly able to take her own decisions, and if many of these decisions are bad, this hardly makes her significantly different to the rest of us.
It’s essentially an early novel
The structure and much of the content of the film have great similarities with 18th and 19th Century novels – most obviously Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but also, for example, Voltaire’s Candide, about a young man expecting the best of all possible worlds. Bella shares Candide’s wild optimism, even though there are plenty of people around her trying to warn her that if this world is the best possible, we are not in a good place.
The novel developed alongside early capitalism, where for the first time men (it was usually men) were able to significantly change their environment. Hence Bella’s insistence that she can make the world better. At the same time, as the film reminds us, there were still huge class differences and the people at the top were venal and corrupt. Bella is this only able to effect small, personal changes, and the world stays pretty much as it was.
It’s not my favourite for the Oscars
The thing that I really liked / like about Poor Things is the joyful silliness. In all the earnest talk about the Oscars, that is not necessarily a bad thing, especially when confronted with the humourless self-importance of Oppenheimer and Maestro. But this week I’ve also seen The Zone of Interest and Anatomy of a Fall, each of which has a gravity that was missing here. It’s not that I didn’t have fun – but I think that as a whole the other two are more substantial films.
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