Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) takes the dance floor in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things (Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures)
If we could exist without shame, fear, or societally imposed standards of good taste and decorum, would we all dance like Emma Stone’s permanently wide-eyed Bella Baxter in Yorgos Lanthimos’s ecstatically whimsical and intoxicatingly weird film Poor Things? I would hope so.
In a dance sequence that instantly replaced the butt-naked post-homicide romp through Saltburn as my favorite in recent memory, Bella, dining in the warm golden glow of a hotel restaurant with her lover, the sleazily smarmy yet attractive libertine lawyer, Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo at his most hilarious), rises as if by reflex to a banging plunging song played by the house band and hurls herself to the dance floor. Like a toddler at a wedding, she makes small hopping leaps forward to the jangling beat then twirls in the center of more, ahem, traditionally dancing couples, her long black hair trailing behind her. Horrified at the potential embarrassment and fixated on what other diners might think, Duncan hurriedly jigs over to her, attempting to lead her in a more suitable dance. However, Bella continues to kick her legs out of her sheer rose skirt with visible white silk panties underneath and twirl him around with her arm around his neck. After leaping in tandem, Duncan with his arm dashingly raised, she leaves him again, hopping with her hips forward, just at the edge of lewd. After finally successfully dancing her back to the table, Duncan slurs, out of breath: “You, like me, are a creature of freedom in the moment.”
He’s only half right. Whereas Bella never gave a shit, Duncan spent their partnered dance trying desperately to contain her unfettered energy with palpable awareness of the gaze of others. Yet he is more correct than he even knows about Bella. Bella Baxter is a creature of freedom, the reanimated corpse of a (we learn later, awful) woman, Victoria Blessington, who flung herself off a bridge, stuffed with the brain of her unborn child. Her creator is Willem Dafoe’s scarred paternal (and paternally scarred) mad scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter who Bella not-too-subtly calls God. With Bella coming back online in a flash of electricity and blaring monster movie music, it would be easy to assume Poor Things is yet another pitch-black sci-fi dystopia closer to Lanthimos’s 2015 The Lobster or Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool. But, it’s not. Bella is a female Frankenstein’s monster with a relentless lust for life. And it’s her yearning for adventure and boundless curiosity that is infectiously and often humorously translated to the audience through the expansively beautiful film. Adapted by screenwriter Tony McNamara from Alasdair Gray’s novel of the same title (which I am currently reading), Poor Things is a profound achievement that is as life-affirming as it is wacky with Bella Baxter as its heroically off-kilter emotional core.
Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) arrives in Poor Things (Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures)
When we first see Bella—and I mean Bella, not Victoria whose fatal swan dive into a river opens the film, an end that is Bella’s beginning, she is curled up in a white dress, hunched over and plunking atonally at a piano. Her bare feet rest on the keys, mirroring the physicality of an inquisitive and a little annoyingly mischievous child. Filmed in black and white, Bella toddles, a unique stiff-legged gait that persists throughout the film, amongst God’s other hastily stitched-together creations such as a dog with the head of a duck and its reverse. Through this early monochromatic part of the film, Bella mentally matures from her initial fetal state. Though consistently childlike with a restricted babyish capacity for language, she still has fun, hitting her researcher and fiancé, the kind, chaste, and perpetually baffled Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), spitting out food, teasing her aptly named minder Mrs. Prim (Vicki Pepperdine), and discovering the wonders of masturbation, including a memorable scene with an apple and a cucumber to Mrs. Prim’s dismay.
This self-pleasuring sexual awakening, filmed in close-up as she rubs one out, her feet shuffling and tensing over the bed sheets and her eyes drifting off to an unknown reverie, is the starting point—the ecstatic key—to her odyssey toward freedom. And when that sexual opportunity comes in the form of slimy Duncan Wedderburn, who brags about his capacity for, as Bella enigmatically calls it, “furious jumping,” Bella takes it and takes off from greyscale London, as the film bursts from black and white to color. Switching from black and white to color is a particularly favorite trick of filmmakers recently whether Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City, or Andrew Dominik’s Blonde. Yet, none of them have echoed Dorothy’s Technicolor arrival in Oz quite as much as Bella’s awestruck entry into the world (as, in some ways, both Dorothy and Scarecrow). Bella emerges into a colorful hallucinatory vision of Jules Verne-esque Victorian Portugal, a land of, as she describes, “sugar and violence.” We’re not in Kansas—or London—anymore and, as Bella proclaims, “It is most charming.” Here, she approaches everything new she encounters with gusto whether shoving whole pastries into her mouth, dancing, discussing partners’ dicks with strangers over dinner, trying to punch babies, or, of course, rampant fucking, all without care for social graces, politeness, morality, or really any conventional standards of behavior, particularly for women.
Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) in Portugal (Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures)
From Portugal, Bella flits off into more fantastical environments. On a ferry bound for Greece, she becomes increasingly fixated with acquiring knowledge, not exactly to the delight of Duncan as he tosses her books overboard, and begins stringing together synonyms as she learns them. In Alexandria, she bears witness to the reality of human suffering as shown to her by Jerrod Carmichael’s cynic Harry Astley. In Paris, destitute after attempting to give Duncan’s gambling winnings to starving children, she works as a prostitute for Katheryn Hunter’s chain smoker-voiced tattooed, Madame Swiney. With a litany of bizarro johns who are credited as the Crab Man (Laurent Borel) and Leg Humping Guy (Andrew Hefler), she also starts a relationship with a French-speaking fellow sex worker and socialist, Toinette (Suzy Bemba).
Much has been made about the sheer amount of sex in the film, including people recoiling on social media or in The Free Press at the deeply embarrassing mistake of seeing the film in the theater with their parents or other relatives over the holidays (as I did with mine. It was fine). This isn’t too much of a surprise as prudish pearl-clutching or at the very least, breathless hyping of sex scenes seems to have some sort of popular cache at the moment. But to me, the sex in Poor Things isn’t filthy per se. It isn’t reveling in depravity or coy naughtiness. It isn’t even particularly intimate for that matter (not like Ira Sach’s Passages in which the hot bisexual sex scenes are probably the only reason to watch the film). In fact, I found most of the sex quite wholesome. Sex in Poor Things is just another physical pleasure—an endlessly fascinating adventure—for Bella, one that she finds deep enjoyment from (“Why do people not just do this all the time?”). While the sex isn’t in itself transgressive, Bella’s guileless lack of shame about it as a woman certainly is, a glimpse of what female sexuality and bodily autonomy could be without societal judgment, internalized self-loathing, or the endless projection of men. Of which there is no shortage for Bella.
Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) and Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) in Poor Things
From the start, Bella exists as a blank slate for most of the men she encounters, whether pseudo-Daddy God, Max, Duncan, or the late appearance of Victoria’s psychotically terrible husband Alfie Blessington (Christopher Abbott). She is, as Gray writes in the novel, “what men have hopelessly yearned for throughout the ages: the soul of an innocent, trusting, dependent child inside the opulent body of a radiantly beautiful lovely woman,” or, as Max puts it more bluntly on screen, “a pretty retard.” With her long black hair that grows several inches every few days, big curious blue eyes, and striking taste in fashion (all those puffy sleeves and singular silhouettes! How can a reanimated corpse have such style?), it’s not hard to see why they’re all enamored. The truth is, though, Bella was never as blank as they wanted her to be, as evidenced by her perpetual pushing against every boundary presented to her. And as she becomes more and more well-versed in the world and determined to pursue her desires, she is less able to be controlled and amusingly drives several men, notably Duncan, insane (“I’ve become the very thing I hate. A grasping succubus of a lover. I’ve pried many of them off me and now I’m it. Fuck!”).
Now, this feminist tale, a cracked coming-of-age story, isn’t particularly novel yet its antipatriarchal message doesn’t feel forced or cliché or desperately appealing to a timely contemporary context. Many have compared the film to Barbie, which I haven’t seen and frankly don’t intend to so I’ll have to take their word for it. To me, Poor Things is reminiscent of the female flipside of Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid (a long but worthwhile double-feature). While that cinematic ride was all flaccid flop-sweaty male anxiety, inadequacy, and Freudian sexual terror, culminating in the unforgettable Penis Monster, Bella’s equally fantastical sexual trip maps a trail of self-discovery, female agency, and pleasure.
Like Beau Is Afraid, as well as the output of others that tend towards a hefty amount of whimsy like Terry Gilliam, Wes Anderson, and Tim Burton before he started cranking out garbage remakes starring bloated Johnny Depp, Poor Things, from Bella’s perplexing manner of speaking to Jerskin Fendrix’s plonking score to the copious use of fish-eye lens, is quirky to a level that could quickly become grating. But it’s not. This is due to a few things: the ridiculous sense of humor baked into the script by McNamara who is no stranger to comedy having also penned Lanthimos’s camp The Favourite, the masterful performances by the actors (if I didn’t think Lily Gladstone’s name was already deservedly etched onto the Best Actress Oscar statue, I’d say give it to Emma Stone), and the ambitious cinematography, sets, and costumes. Robbie Ryan’s cinematography, in particular, presents a level of intoxicating detail, whether the silken fabric of Bella’s puffy sleeves or the freckles on her skin, that allows the audience to see the wonder of the world as if through Bella’s fresh newbie eyes. “I am finding being alive fascinating,” she says. Shouldn’t we all?