Yorgos Lanthimos
Poor Things

My review walks on eggshells after the marvelous writings of ANATOLY and MARKION, who captured a series of aspects that I hadn't considered or better yet, deciphered.

For honesty's sake and a natural aversion to redundancy, I will try not to repeat myself and if I do, it would be a really bad copy, not to SLAPP the aforementioned two but because CATEGORIES exist, and I don't play in that league, I wouldn't even touch the ball or almost.

The film is very beautiful and enchanting, it is a complex, passionate, and very ambitious work, full of more or less universal concepts.

A dark fairy tale, heavily inspired by Frankenstein, the legendary novel by Mary Shelley, Poor Things narrates the genesis, the evolution, and the catharsis of Bella Baxter, played by Emma Stone, very very good but not so sensational in my opinion. For me, she deserves an 8, not a 10, to be clear.

The opening is crazy and powerful, I won't spoil it but it's strong stuff, Frankenstein indeed, imitate me but don't copy me says BONCI in PIZZA HERO, well it's an imitation with bells on, deserving applause.

The film unfolds with notable visual solutions, the switch between B/W and color, the use of a wide-angle lens, the amazing special effects that always generate in me the suspension of disbelief because it's all fake, it's virtual reality. I got the same effect from Beau is Afraid, two contemporary films by two great directors of this time, as it happens that watching this I found myself more than once thinking back to Beau... The soundtrack, calibrated, powerful, sets and brands certain sequences but is never invasive if anything oppressive when needed. The acting department? Excellent too, as we said Stone and Dafoe, for me the best, a giant (score 9) the GOD, the creator, the deformed monster, the empiricist who all his life represses emotions to serve science, as his dad taught him, but no other living being LIVES on emotions like man, not even he... and he will notice, will certainly notice being human all too human... As for skillfulness, I can't say the same for GOD's assistant, rather decent a 6 out of respect, and for Mark Ruffalo who plays Duncan Wedderburn the Don Juan who kidnaps Bella and will lose his head for her because he realizes he cannot possess her and I do not mean physically, for that they'll have a lot of romps in bed, for me out of place, a caricature (score 5) but plays an important role in the "message" of the film. Only the message is not just one, on the contrary.

Oh yes, this writing is turning out a fair bit of rubbish, a stew where you can't distinguish the flavors, how do I get out of this now?

I'm lazy and as that pig RamirezAlHassar rightly says, I am just a workman... but passionate! No more chatter.

What did I like? Quite a few things. The directorial department, the photography, the set design, the soundtrack, we are at very high levels, a visual pleasure. The contents? Here it gets difficult, the film I repeat is very ambitious and has the "pretension" to dissect the complexity of the human soul and tries to understand how man could be, removed from maneuver, that is estranged from social conventions, from overstructures, and here Markion has said a lot so I'll keep quiet. And what would this man be like? No one knows, we only know that the prototype of man is the child, in all his naivety and purity, devoid of prejudices, frank, direct, good... Good? Good no. Good doesn't mean anything. Do we want to say RIGHTEOUS? Not even, the concept of absolute justice doesn't exist, is an invention of man. NATURAL! And indeed with this concept of god/universe/nature/happiness the Anatolic even opens his review extrapolating a phrase of Bella, not present in the film but in the novel and for this, he laments.

And here it goes wrong for Lanthimos... But neither can you attach him so much the operation is complex, rather a bravo because he tried. In my opinion, it goes wrong for him the evolution of Bella, from wild delayed animalistic and violent in the first period of her life, secluded in the laboratory because the world outside is bad, stay here listen to GOD, to curious know-it-all (the ship, the books, the philosophy, her the old lady who knows, the boy accompanying the old lady, overly cynical but it will be discovered he uses cynicism only as armor against evils) who travels the world and has experiences and suddenly makes herself a saint and suffers as never before seeing the poor and children dying of hunger, but never for herself, like when for money she sells her body in Paris and does everything detached, like a spectator, like a scientist who only does experiments...

Then the final twist that gives the go to the ending/finale of the movie that I found crap. Lantimos... you do all this hullabaloo and then close on a stupid note? Well...

I believe that man deep down doesn't behave that much differently from an animal, only that the animal plays with open cards: prey/predator, mors tua/vita mea. Man instead plays dirty, this is mine this other too. Man exaggerates, it's all mine! I command! You are mine! the possession, the patriarchy, the jealousy, lanima de limortaccitua... I think the wrong ingredient that man always puts in everything he does is competition, I am better than you! The delusion of omnipotence – and God made man in his image and likeness – basically we still haven't understood a damn thing about how to be in the world, and neither has Lanthimos understood much, all the more since in the end, he gives up and concludes with a crappy happy ending that doesn't represent a damn thing for me. and I haven't said a word (let's keep that sky closed) about why he played it that way, now that he's also in the Olympus, now that he too, must ACCOUNT FOR IT.

Oh yes, I forgot about sex (as if it were nothing), the eros that dominates and devours and that here is the engine that pushes Bella towards the outside world. The natural drive, and see it guarantees the continuation of the species... well here it is illustrated as something not only "necessary" and we already knew that, it is fundamental unless we want to start procreating in vitro, but as I was saying it's painted as... like a demon that possesses us? like something that in the end decides everything itself? like an addiction? like a drug? and if sex were instead overrated? in short, the possession of sex that was pre-Battiato-like? who can say? well I said it.