Poor Things, the most peculiar and remarkable film by Yorgos Lanthimos, shook the 80th Venice Film Festival and won the Golden Lion. An extraordinary film that meticulously constructs its unique world with an extremely calculated form, it can elevate Lanthimos’s eccentric universe, which was never fully reached perfection in his preavious films.
Poor Things is a striking film about women and the power of femininity to change the world. Essentially, from the very beginning, it critiques the norms of today’s world where everything is bound by moralities and societal expectations. Lanthimos, right from the start, challenges this reliance on and reverence for public belief through a woman who is reborn and seeks to rediscover the world with her feminine body.
The film follows a strange narrative in which Victoria, a wealthy woman with a child in her womb, commits suicide. Dr. Godwin (referred to as “God”) in a Frankenstein-esque world finds her body and places the child’s brain inside her head. Now, she, renamed “Bella,” having been reborn, rediscovers everything, including sex and her connection to the world around her.
The character of a woman reborn with a child’s brain is the striking focal point that permeates the entire film and highlights a blatant contradiction: Bella has the body of a woman but the brain of a child. On one hand, she must conform to conventional moralities, but her female body has different expectations and raises unanswered questions. From here, these contradictions peak, eloquently posing fundamental questions about humanity and challenge the established order – the order constructed by human hands – inviting us to take a deeper, more comprehensive, and detached look at a world built on shaky foundations that a woman is challenging.
From this point, the feminine world of the film takes shape, and the film fundamentally and essentially celebrates the female. In a world that is extremely masculine, where the patriarchal God is immersed in his paternalistic world, the lover loves this women only for himself (despite his claim to have had relationships with hundreds of women), and Victoria’s husband is an unbearable and abusive general, the film sets the stage for a highly entertaining and intriguing fate for this infatuated patriarch that the viewer will never forget.
The transformation of this woman is meticulously calculated and precise, essentially hinging on a historical/social transformation. It satirizes socialism while simultaneously delving into class differences, forming a part of the film’s world. The woman, now distanced from social norms and societal expectations due to the child’s brain, acts freely and instinctively. Her actions symbolically protest against everything entrenched in our surroundings. Her journey to other countries becomes a self-discovery odyssey, culminating in a fascinating and stunning final twist that, without veering into slogans or disregarding the plethora of seemingly feminist films of these days – which operate at surface level and confuse cinema with article writing and manifesto declarations – delves deep into the female world’s meaning and significance, making it believable and acceptable to us.
Lanthimos, in an extremely content-rich form, constructs a strange world right from the start, a world whose coordinates diverge from the real world. The black-and-white space of the first part allows him to make characters of the Mary Shelley type believable to us, using a camera that always selects unconventional angles and strange lenses that sometimes distort images. The camera’s great movements serve the creation of this world and the characters who have little connection to our world.
In the second half, as the woman transitions from childhood into society, the film becomes colorful, and now we rediscover the world alongside this woman/child. The exploration of sexual pleasure and its contradiction with common moralities becomes an important part of the film that drives forward the female world and challenges conventional morals. Bella’s simple and fundamental questions, which may seem crude from others’ perspectives, both amuse and make us empathize with her. To such an extent that the viewer, whether male or female, experiences a peculiar feminine journey in which sex is portrayed fearlessly and differently from the closed cinema of recent years. Here, the male viewer doesn’t have the opportunity for voyeurism, and the camera’s angles and the manner in which sex is depicted create scenes more about participation in sex from a woman’s perspective and discovering it.
Although the film slows down somehow in the second half and could have been slightly shorter, Lanthimos ultimately concludes his world with a breathtaking final scene.
© 2020-2023. UniversalCinema Mag.