02/09/2023 - VENICE 2023: Greek-turned-international director Yorgos Lanthimos packs a real punch with a period film like no other

Emma Stone in Poor Things

The long-awaited return of Greek Oscar winner Yorgos Lanthimos, Poor Things [+see also:
trailer
interview: Suzy Bemba
Q&A: Yorgos Lanthimos
film profile], is one of this year’s most delightful surprises. The Venice Golden Lion contender may not be easy to describe, but the hybrid label of “gothic coming-of-age sex comedy” offers a gratifying approximation to what this film tastes like. Lanthimos’s seventh feature is not only his second period effort after The Favourite [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], but it is also the second one to be written by Tony McNamara, instead of the director himself. In this case, the script is adapted from Scottish writer Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel of the same name, which Lanthimos enlivens with a star-studded cast: Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Mark Ruffalo and Ramy Youssef are in the leads.

In the novel, an eccentric doctor brings a young woman back to life after her apparent suicide, giving her the brain of her unborn child. In awe of his experiment, Dr Godwin Baxter (Dafoe) appoints Max McCandles (Youssef) to help gather daily data, to record her development. While there are obvious echoes of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein here, Poor Things is dedicated to the making of a woman, or how a woman makes herself. Unlike the book, Lanthimos’s film sticks to said woman’s, Bella’s, point of view in both content and form. As her speech and movements become smoother, the world we witness expands, becoming more incandescent by the minute: from its black-and-white beginning to the oversaturated colours that follow. As soon as she decides to elope with the famous flirt Duncan Wedderburn (Ruffalo), we’re treated to mesmerising cityscapes – Lisbon, Alexandria and Paris – whose stylised look enhances Bella’s own sense of wonder.

Tony McNamara moves the original setting from a politically significant Victorian Glasgow to a whimsical London, and in doing so, the political allegory dissipates to make room for literal meaning, exemplified through Bella’s corporeal way of being in the world. If Lanthimos was drawn to the idea of a mind as tabula rasa (the Enlightenment's dream), his filmmaking renders it through the body. A close collaboration with Stone – who also serves as a producer – ensured a gradual character build-up to yield electrifying results. A versatile actress, Stone excels herself here, with a performance that implements every stage of her character’s process of socialisation in her posture, walking and speech. Bella’s autonomy is directly linked to her sexuality, and this discovery – in the myriad impressive sex scenes – is also mapped on her body and movements. The Favourite cinematographer Robbie Ryan lenses these shifts through close-ups and fish-eye, often spliced together by Lanthimos’s longstanding editor Yorgos Mavropsaridis, to create familiarity through distance at the right moment.

Poor Things reveals Lanthimos’s taste for close-up framing and flamboyant aesthetics, unlocking a new facet of his imaginative approach to storytelling. Decisively bettering Gray’s source material by opting for a more fitting ending, the Greek director has made what seems his most hopeful film yet. He couldn’t have chosen a more suitable movie to strip of its political allegories: the corporeal challenges at the heart of Poor Things are not only overcome, but are overcome with gusto, empathy and a lot of caustic humour. One can never really brace oneself for its spectacle, nor for the riches of bizarre vitality that it offers, despite the title’s promise.

Poor Things is a Searchlight Pictures presentation, produced by Ireland's Element Pictures and UK's Film4, together with US companies Fruit Tree and TSG Entertainment. Searchlight Pictures also handles the world sales.

Photogallery 01/09/2023: Venice 2023 - Poor Things

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Yorgos Lanthimos, Yoyo Cao, Madison Rian, Miguel Ángel Silvestre, Clara Galle, Matilde Gioli, Holly Waddington, H. Stacey, Robbie Ryan, James Price, Ed Guiney, Andrew Lowe
© 2023 Fabrizio de Gennaro for Cineuropa - fadege.it, @fadege.it