It’s been out on general release for a couple of months now, but the controversy surrounding Yorgos Lanthimos’ adaptation of Alasdair Gray ‘s Poor Things shows little sign of abating. It seems many people have missed the point.
The preoccupation with the sex (or “furious jumping” as Emma Stone’s lead character Bella Baxter calls it) has overshadowed a rather brilliant satire. It’s an unlacing of the corsetry of period dramas, a badly behaved pastiche with enough pathos to give it heart.
The film’s detractors say Emma Stone’s Bella is a toddler in an adult body when she goes off on a sexually -charged adventure across the world with Duncan Wedderburne, Mark Ruffalo’s OTT cad. She isn’t. A dead woman, revived by scientist Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) who has transplanted her unborn baby’s brain into her, she has cognitive ability rapidly accelerated every day, and her brain is up to reading philosophy by the time she’s reached Lisbon. So, a baby she is not.
Indeed, when Bella advocates for herself, Duncan flies into an adult tantrum, no longer in control and disgusted by her independence. There’s a nod to another famous cinematic misogynist, Stanley Kowalski from A Streetcar Named Deaire, as he screams, ‘BELLA! ” outside her window.
It’s an extended metaphor for the death of Victorian Puritanism (the dead woman was called Victoria) a meditation on patriarchy, and an ode to self-actualisation, through ideas, food, travel and sex. It’s peppered with anachronisms: flying trams, short skirts, the use of fish eye lens. Although the scene is initially set in London, there’s a nod to the famous Edinburgh bodysnatchers Burke and Hare.
Bella is not just a Pygmalion or Frankenstein’s Monster. She epitomises the excluded other, in the time of Suffrage and beyond. I see Mary Wollstonecraft, Simone de Beauvoir and Alice, through the looking glass and catapulted straight into a brothel. Like an Angela Carter heroine, sex for money often amuses her. She rebuffs Wedderburne with a backwards glance and a clipped , “We are our own means of production”.
Here, though, she’s exploited by the enigmatic Madame Swiney (Kathryn Hunter, below, channeling Maude Stevens Wagner, the tattooed lady) who rejects her fanciful notions of washing the clients.
She’s unfiltered, unabashed and completely her own woman. And the keyboard prudes are having none of it – which proves the entire point the film is making. Society still isn’t ready for Bella Baxter.
