ReCooper8

About ten years ago, I asked a group of girlfriends the question: what if women were truly free? 

At the time of asking we were all a little drunk and lolling in a hot tub, which might colour your judgment as to the validity of the question. I arrived at it after a frustrating discussion about pay equity, which left me feeling furious at the conditions [and conditioning] that exist ensuring women’s contributions are persistently undervalued. 

What would we do? How would we live? Where would we go? How would it feel if women were really, unutterably free?

In the intervening decade, I’ve returned to these questions time and time again. Now, as then, answering them induces a sort of mental vertigo, like looking at the stars and being confronted with the unreachable limitlessness of the universe. 

In Yorgos Lanthimos’ film, Poor Things, I think I found the start of a response. A barking mad, hallucinogenic, chaotic, joyous, sexy, visceral, cacophonous response.

A smash lab for the senses. 

What it means to be free and to exercise freedom of choice, expression and being are questions that lie at the heart of this film.  

Adapted from Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel, the movie stars Emma Stone as Bella Baxter, a creation formed from the reanimated corpse of a pregnant woman who died by suicide. The mind of this ‘monster’ is that of the unborn child. 

Through the film’s two hours and 21 minutes [which felt a little long at times], Bella Baxter relentlessly subverts, challenges and shatters a sequence of patriarchal types or tropes in a rampant and sometimes disturbing fashion. 

Initially, she upsets conventional norms through a heady and often comedic mix of innocence, naivete and irrepressible joie de vivre.

As her mastery of language develops, her physical movements smooth out, and her sexual appetite and experience grow, her insurrection against the vagaries and iniquities of the dominant culture and her refusal to allow that culture to imprint on her becomes increasingly more deliberate, bold and courageous. 

The male characters are a roll call of archetypes of traditional power and control.

There’s God[win], the ultimate father figure/creator, [himself a mangled product of male power and control] played by Willem Defoe; Mark Ruffalo’s louche philanderer, Duncan Wedderburn; Harry, the erudite philosopher-king [played by Jerrod Carmichael]; and Christopher Abbott’s deliciously unhinged psychopathic husband, Alfie Blessington.

The antidote to the male chauvinism and toxic masculinity Bella must navigate is Ramy Youssef’s character, Max McCandles, who becomes one of Bella’s few allies in creating an alternative path for personhood. 

This film is not an ‘easy watch’. With its wall-eyed camera work, use of a black and white palette, sumptuous architectural wardrobe, and steam-punk-inspired universe, this movie demands your attention, seeks to unsettle, and is, depending on your tolerance for on-screen sex, confronting.  

By all accounts, it’s the sex that has got audiences talking the most. But, while there was a lot of it, it didn’t feel gratuitous or unnecessary.

It’s Bella’s principle vehicle for self-expression and assertiveness. And it’s potentially an ideal one given that men and women occupy such uneven playing fields regarding sex and sexual expression. To witness a female character enjoy her sexuality with such appetite and without a hint of shame or embarrassment was refreshing.