Poor Things

Poor Things

Director ~ Yorgos Lanthimos

Writers ~ Tony McNamaram, Alasdair Gray

2023, Ireland-UK-USA-Hungary

Stars ~ Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe

Like ‘Barbie’ for Goths and Tim Burton fans, ‘Poor Things’ is similarly a tale of gender existentialism, of a woman finding her place in a patriarchal world. It also reminded me a little of Ransom Riggs’ appropriating old photographs to generate a narrative for ‘Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children’ and the work of Walter Potter. It has excellent Bafta award- winning set design by Shona Heath, James Price and Zsuzsa Mihalek, a brilliantly wonky score by Jerskin Fendric, and is afflicted with fish-eye lens. If at first it seems dangerously close to a male fantasy of creating and maltreating a child-woman, it soon becomes apparent that this is not a ‘Weird Science’ fantasy but more musing on nature and nurture.

 

Dr Godwin Baxter (yeh yeh: God.) makes Bella Baxter, Frankenstein style, utilising a suicide victim, but it is evidently more interested in the creation of a daughter-figure rather than the impulses of a dirty old man. In fact, the film walks this fine line deftly until Bella’s curiosity is insatiable and she is able to assert herself. And these are not men to hold her back. As an examination of Bella’s self-discovery, it never allows her to be a victim even when she chooses prostitution as an option to maintain freedom. Her tale is just blithely stomping through patriarchy and class and blithely not acknowledging their attacks on her curiosity, whether carnal or intellectual (although we get more of the former demonstrated rather than the latter). Her tale is not one of overcoming suffering and abuse; we have that in Godwin’s hints of his childhood.

I am aware of critical heralding of Emma Stone’s Bafta Award-winning performance and have heard anecdotally how it annoyed others. She certainly gives it her all as she stomps and furious jumps her way through experience and naïveté in a manner more defiant than innocent. But it is Mark Ruffalo’s turn as a conceited lothario that surely steals the show as he goes from cocksure seducer to broken man in Bella’s wake. Their dance scene is a highlight.

There is of course a lot absent from the novel – Scottish politics for one; faux-Victorian London in place of Glasgow* – and the longer the film goes on it surely loses its argument for its length. It feels an act too long and Bella’s conclusions get increasingly muddled. The most glaring moral failing is that Bella discovered and melted down over class guilt of recognising poverty and yet the film achieves her happy ending by sidestepping any awareness she has developed and leaves her lounging wealthily in an English garden, blissfully privileged and ignoring the truths that made her so outraged. (This is not the same as the book.)

There is black humour, of course, but the tone here is more in the amusing absurdity of Godwin burping gigantic bubbles at dinner. It is not nearly as acerbic and finely tuned as ‘The Favourite’ ~ another Tony McNamara script ~ but perhaps Lanthimos has never worn comedy so clearly on his sleeve. Or rejected the dark comedic potential of cruelty so readily, for that is not Bella’s way. Danny Leigh writes, “Like The Favourite, his new film comes to feel like a costume drama for an age that thinks itself above costume dramas.” Yes, but this is a fantasia and just falls short of steampunk; it is not so much a metafiction commenting upon itself rather than a series of amusements full of fantastical and/or incongruous detail.

It’s a heady confection whose oddness is always engaging, and yet there is the sense that this is less than the sum of its considerable parts. Or that its goofiness falls just short of greatness. Perhaps the gleeful chaos of this picaresque bildungsroman achieves more diversion than conclusion. Perhaps a near miss, then, but the aesthetic and the picaresque chaos of Bella’s self-discovery offers many treats, not to mention a widening of Lanthimos’ range.

 

·         * In his ‘Little White Lies’ interview (No. 101 Dec ‘23/Jan’24), Lanthimos talks of how the Scottish element of the novel felt like another book, and so they focused on Bella. This also led to the change of ending. Regarding the change to London, Lanthimos says that, “Well, I think Alasdair probably wouldn’t be very happy about that, because he was a very proud Scotsman.”

Guardians of the Galaxy vol.3

Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 3

Writer & Director – James Gunn

2023,     United States-New Zealand-France-Canada

Stars – Chris Pratt, Chukwudi Iwuji, Bradley Cooper, Pom Klementieff, Dave Bautista, Karen Gillen, Will Poulter

 

Humorous banter, lashings of CGI and overwhelming sci-fi visuals, needle drops, down-to-earth characterisation of crazy protagonists, equal parts sentimentality and horror detail. In this final volume, with Rocket’s history being central, never has the horror/sentimental mash-up taken such precedence in‘Guardians’. The whole vivisection-animal-experiments angle veers the narrative into darker terrain than before, giving pay-off to Rocket’s reluctance to talk about his past in previous volumes. It’s like ‘Toy Story’s Sid for adults, plus eugenics and genocide, topped off with a genuinely unhinged turn by Chukwudi Iwuji as the High Evolutionary (achieving psychosis even more than scenery chewing).

 

Gunn delivers an arguably overlong final instalment without once taking the foot off the pedal, although all the oddball pathos of the Rocket flashbacks inevitably ends in an explosive CGI space-free-for-all. The rapid tonal changes might cause “emotional whiplash” but Gunn knows how to juggle. In fact, there such an Anything Goes element to Gunn’s writing that it’s entirely possible that some major characters might get killed off. Adam Warlock (Will Poulter) is arguably superfluous but inevitably setting up something else (there’s a lot of hints of that); there’s a great corridor fight feigning one-take (those are always highlights and Gunn has elsewhere hat-tipped to ‘Oldboy’); arguably too many characters, yet Gunn gives them all their due, mostly (maybe not Warlock though); excellent detail gives way to broad character arcs and declarations. 

 

And the most gratifying and unexpected needle drop for me was The Flaming Lips ‘Do You Realise?’; and there’s another outing for The The’s timeless ‘This is the Day’ (been listening to that one for nearly all my life), but Faith No More too.

 

It's a lot of fun that probably won’t win over those bored of super-hero hi-jinx, even if in space, but proves again that Gunn is one of the consistently best at this. After all, it’s the genre trend to emulate the ensemble funny banter that the first ‘Guardians’ pretty much pioneered, though few are as good (see Gunn’s ‘The Peacemaker’ series for even better, more hilarious banter). It’s all much of a muchness, and it ain’t subtle, but there’s a genuine core centred on the characters rather than just performative drama hitting the marks. Something to do with believing in the ragtag rough-and-ready group of outsiders, which he excels at, and spinning out everything from there. It’s just as scrappy, motivated, all-over-the-place and charming as its central team.

 

 

Barbarella

Barbarella

Director – Roger Vadim

Writers – Jean-Claude Forest, Terry Southern, Roger Vadim

1968, France-Italy

Stars – Jane Fonda, John Phillip Law, Anita Pallenberg

 

It’s intentionally silly because it is fully tongue-in-cheek: not quite a spoof in the same way as ‘Airplane!’ or ‘Austin Powers’, but there’s certainly a throughline to De Laurentis’ ‘Flash Gordon’. ‘Barbarella’ parodies the kind of sci-fi-epic-porn-lite that you could find in ‘Heavy Metal’ and ‘Metal Hurlant’ magazines -  well, actually it’s based upon Jean-Claude Forest’s comic. A comedy. Yes: laugh at the alien ray-sled thing. Many reactions are from the “you can’t do that anymore” as Barbarella goes on an adventure as a somewhat slightly oblivious sex-kitten, by which they seem to mean that they lament the days where it was just fine to objectify women on screen, which tells more about them than the film. Yes, it’s unrepentantly leery and a sexy romp in a Sixties style, but the film is also far trickier and it’s too self-aware to come across as malicious. It’s too playful and parodic.

Jane Fonda may have had reservations afterwards, but her natural intelligence always shines through; she’s never dumb or quite exploited in a ‘Carry On’ manner and crucially her performance is knowing, always in on the joke, so the sexism is more a punchline than just exploitative. For comparison, the men are nothing to write home about – although the child-catcher she first meets seems hairy and fair enough (Ugo Tognazzi) – being vapidly angelic (John Philip Law) or cackhanded or duplicitous. And then there are little subversive touches such as an orgy of women bonging of essence of man.

 

It's the sets and costumes and the outrageous décor and campness that is so enjoyable. The story itself goes off into the clouds and is quite expendable, but it’s the costumes and design, the set-pieces and goofiness that matter. There’s Barbarella’s fully furred-up spaceship; the children-and-biting-dolls is a nightmarish classic; the encounter with Dildano (David Hemmings) is perhaps the most accomplished comic sequence. And if you go with it, it’s fun and gleefully of its psychedelic era.

When I saw this now at the cinema, it had the right audience laughing with and not at it, to the full benefit of the screening. It was certainly a film I enjoyed more the second time around and treating as the kind of self-aware genre amusement that are everywhere now. And then afterwards, in the tiny bar, there was a DJ playing Sixties psychedelica, which was most pleasing.