![]() This almost Steampunk fantasy version of Victoriana, often shot with fish-eye lenses by the gifted cinematographer Robbie Ryan, suggests just how radically strange the world must look to Bella's eyes. His production designers, Shona Heath and James Price, have dreamed up a futuristic, candy-colored vision of the 19th century, where people movers soar over city streets and chimneys belch green smoke into a dark purple sky. Lanthimos has never been afraid of anachronism, and here he embraces it head-on. If Bella's baroque dialogue makes Poor Things a lot of fun to listen to, the film is also gorgeous to look at. Bella responds, as she often does, by referring to herself in the third person: "These two are fighting and ideas are banging around in Bella's head and heart like lights in a storm." At one point, while they're on a European boat cruise, Duncan becomes jealous, accusing Bella of spending too much time with two other travelers, who are having an engrossing intellectual debate. Soon, she begins making new friends, reading Emerson and nourishing her mind. She learns that men are mostly horrible, and that the world is full of suffering and poverty. When we first meet Bella in 19th-century London, she looks like an adult woman but has the awkward gait, unformed speech and anarchic spirit of a very young child.īefore long, Bella grows bored - and disillusioned. The story, loosely adapted from a 1992 novel by the Scottish writer Alasdair Gray, follows a most unusual character named Bella Baxter, played by a mesmerizing Emma Stone. This may be Lanthimos' most unhinged movie, but it also has a joyous exuberance that I haven't felt in much of his earlier work. It also has a lot in common with some of Yorgos Lanthimos' earlier films, like The Favourite and Dogtooth: transgressive sex, sadistic power games and grisly violence.īut if the movie is brutal, it's also extravagantly beautiful, extremely funny and, by the end, strangely touching, even uplifting. ![]() Poor Things is a little Alice in Wonderland, a little Wizard of Oz, a little Marquis de Sade and a whole lot of Frankenstein. In Poor Things, Emma Stone stars as Bella Baxter, a woman created as part of a back-from-the-dead mad science experiment. ![]()
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