Yorgos Lanthimos
Povere creature!

Nearly five months after winning the Golden Lion at Venice and five years after the Italian release of The Favourite, the new film by Yorgos Lanthimos, one of the greatest filmmakers of our era, and one of the few to always spark debate, is finally in cinemas.

"Only second-rate religions rely on mysteries, just like second-rate governments rely on secret police. Truth, beauty, and goodness are not mysterious; they are the most common, obvious, and essential facts of life, like sunlight, air, bread. Only people with their brains muddled by an expensive education think that truth, beauty, and goodness are rare private properties. Nature is more generous. The universe denies us nothing essential; it gives us everything. God is the universe plus mind. Those who say God or the universe or nature are mysterious are like those who define these things as jealous or angry. They only betray the solitary and confused state of their own minds." Bella Baxter, Poor Things by Alasdair Gray

Poor Things: the discovery of the world is a dance in chapters.

Lanthimos is well represented, in his delirious essence, by the dances he stages in almost every one of his films. There always comes a moment in his works where we witness the dance of some protagonists, and it is a subtly disturbing moment as well as sinisterly hilarious. After all, black humor is the true peculiar feature of the director of Dogtooth and The Lobster. The dance scenes - in a disturbing living room, in the woods, at the royal court palace, on a ship - are the perfect emblem of a world whose natural direction has somehow been diverted until it becomes a world often senseless, or in which sense is lost. But which hides a vitality kept in check and thus eager to explode like an active volcano. Just like sexuality.

Indeed, Lanthimos has always depicted a repressed but ready-to-ignite eroticism, especially when long held back. Consider the significant scene in The Lobster where Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz almost devour each other in a passionate kiss, within a dystopian context that enforces coupling on one hand and, on the other, forbids love as an act of rebellion. Lanthimos is the sharpest analyst of extremes and human absurdities, and showcases all this with the powerful instrument of satire, long opposed by power.

But true satire is for the few. Without mincing words, Lanthimos is the greatest satirical author of contemporary cinema, whereas in the past the greatest was one of his masters, namely Stanley Kubrick. His satire deeply grasps all aspects of human society, whose impetus is confined within the possibilities of the flesh, impulses, passions, and desires, which cannot indeed be restrained by the control that man has deluded himself into exercising through language, religion, and culture.

Sex is a primal force, which, since Dogtooth, has always been at the center of discourse in Lanthimos's cinema. Mechanical and dehumanized sex, sometimes almost imposed, or an ancient tool of power and social climbing, but also and above all, as in Poor Things, a means of discovery and liberation.

The sex scenes here are abundant and repeated, but not indulged or voyeuristic like a Kechiche (Poor Things is still a mainstream film). Rather, Bella's furious thrusts give the sense of a rushing river, a spring overflowing with an unstoppable necessity to explore the world and the pleasure of life. Of experimentation.

Lanthimos observes this through his typical wide-angle lens, showing a deformed and deforming humanity, yet captured in its purest form and the various facets of its nature, only apparently opposite, actually inherent to the complexity that permeates everything: the one and its opposite equal and contrary. Empathy and cruelty, the naive yet commendable desire to improve the world and disillusionment, selfless affection, and possessiveness, love and nihilism. All faces of the same coin called human experience.

Emma Stone is stunning; only she could portray Bella Baxter, a poor and wonderful creature who is brought back to life after voluntarily depriving herself of it, and who gradually (re)discovers the pleasures, horrors, and contradictions of this world, and with them the limitless power of sexuality, which remains the only true escape route. And the red thread that connects each individual. The only one, in fact, not sexually interested in Bella is Godwin, called God, father, creator, and scientist, deprived of his genitalia by experiments his father conducted in the name of progress.

No less important, of course, indeed central alongside the reflection on sexuality, is that on the role of women in society, with a perspective of emancipation and independence in line with the spirit of the times—and consequently of the art—we are living through. In this era of redefining gender roles.

In Poor Things, inevitable suggestions and references to various other works coexist: from Frankenstein, of course, to Dogtooth in the (above-mentioned) reflection on deconstructed verbal language as opposed to the universal language of the body, Belle de Jour in the Parisian scenes—Bunuel, along with Kubrick, has always been one of Lanthimos's major reference points—but also a less obvious title like The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser: Bella, being cerebrally a child, approaches life with a pure and unaware gaze toward the horrors of civilization, like the young Kaspar brought to cinema by Herzog and Bruno S, thus capturing the grotesque madness and relative neuroses of bourgeois society. Which she desecrates also with the use of a simple yet scathing remark/observation.

As Bella says in the quote I initially shared, unfortunately not included in the film, the universe gives us everything. It is only man who renders it mysterious and grotesque through his absurd conventions and social limitations of a bourgeoisie not even endowed with a discreet charm.

It is a mad, bestial world, of abominations, injustices, and inequalities, as well as intense pleasures. But for better or worse, it is still the only one we have. We poor creatures, ripped from the peaceful darkness of nonexistence to be hurled into this universe of chaos. That man has attempted to regulate through the aforementioned conventions, in vain.

But aside from everything, Poor Things is a triumph of style, a feast for the eyes, such is the wealth of visual virtuosity and variety. Lanthimos's most ambitious film—which doesn't mean the best, it's right to specify—and bewitching.

Long live Lanthimos and his cinema of liberation. Even if it is less disturbing today and, in a way, lighter than in the past, and this turn, if it can be called so, was already evident in The Favourite. But this is also a sign of greatness: few directors, even when they legitimately aim for a wider audience, remain at very high levels without compromising any of their art.

Therefore, I am firmly convinced that in a few decades, the Greek director will be remembered as one of the pillars of cinema of these early decades of the new millennium. And Poor Things can only confirm this long-standing belief of mine, even if perhaps it is not considered his absolute best film.