Sex, Lies & Liberation In Emma Stone's Poor Things

Poor Things: The Singularity Of Emma Stone's 'Feminist Frankenstein'

With Oscars 2024 darling Poor Things, director Yorgos Lanthimos’ off-kilter sensibilities reach their baroque climax, writes Prahlad Srihari

IN Poor Things, sex is a vehicle for self-discovery. The world seems black and white to Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), a literal woman-child in 19th century London, until a search for the technicolor intoxications of pleasure sets her on an educational odyssey of sex, politics and the ways of men. Bella is a 25-year-old woman created in a freak science experiment. Her body is her own but her brain came from an eight-month-old foetus.

For the purposes of this Frankenfeature from Yorgos Lanthimos, what that means is Bella is a blank slate with an ever-growing curiosity and no sense of boundaries. While living under the thumb of her creator, she chances upon masturbation in an aha moment. There is no hankering or fantasy that drives her to reach between her legs. It is a stroke of serendipity. Soon, the science experiment can’t stop experimenting herself: first with an apple and then a cucumber. The results prove satisfying. Only when she shares the delights of her newfound libido with the maid does she learn “polite society” frowns upon talking about self-pleasure, never mind openly indulging in it.

“Polite society” conditions us to be uncomfortable with our bodies and the pleasures for which they yearn. But being a blank slate with an insatiable appetite and no impulse control, Bella doesn’t share our discomfort. When she has sex for the first time, the experience awakens in her a desire to know the world in all its lurid colours, while opening a portal to reclaim her body as her own. “Furious jumping,” as Bella calls it, captures the intensity of her experience, prizing the trial-and-error empiricism of “fucking” over the awkward eroticism of “making love.”

Echoes of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, Voltaire’s Candide and the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea ring through the steampunk frenzy of Bella’s pleasure tour in Poor Things. This harlequin travelogue of a young woman journeying towards autonomy also angles itself as a madcap burlesque about the neurotic tendencies of men who would rather contain it. Men of all kinds look to possess Bella and rein her in over the course of her unsentimental education. But Bella resists.

So does Stone, by freeing herself from the expectations of all the roles that came before. Through an ungainly physicality and an off-key cadence, she renders what it would feel like to be an oversized baby taking in new information about a constantly changing world. And she does it with sensitivity without stumbling into caricature. Watching some 20 years of Bella’s psychosexual evolution — from a 5’6” toddler into an empowered woman — in less than two and a half hours makes for a spectacular distorting mirror.

With Poor Things, Lanthimos’s off-kilter sensibilities reach their baroque climax. The Greek filmmaker’s 2009 breakthrough Dogtooth was a diabolical shocker about an iron-fisted father (Christos Stergioglou) who locks his three adult children in a state of arrested development, holding them prisoners in their own home. The youngest daughter (Mary Tsoni) strives to break free from her controlled upbringing so as to experience the world outside. Poor Things could be seen as a spiritual sequel: what comes next after she does escape? Screenwriter Tony McNamara has already displayed a loose fixation on historical fact with two wonderfully absurd takes on the period drama: first with The Favourite and then with The Great. The wit may not be as vicious or the expletives as florid in Poor Things. But the fixation on fidelity in adapting Alastair Gray’s 1992 novel is just as loose.

Where the novel is structured as an autobiography by Bella’s husband, the film centres its focus almost entirely on Bella. Indeed, Bella wasn’t always Bella. Before she recreates herself on her own terms, she was a man-made woman. Her creator, Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), fished out a drowned pregnant woman and replaced her brain with that of her unborn daughter.

Such an experiment can be considered something of a family tradition in the Baxter household. Godwin, or “God” as Bella aptly calls him, was himself the subject of his father’s cruel scientific experiments, the outcomes of which have left him with a patchworked face and dependent on a machine for digestion. Post-digestion, he burps a sole air bubble — one of the strange but delightful touches in the film. All kinds of strange animal hybrids roam around the garden of the Baxter mansion: a lamb with the head of a goose, a duck with the head of a bulldog, a hen with the head of a pig, etc. Each hybrid, designed with deliberately bad CGI, embodies a plea against tinkering with nature in the name of progress.

God’s latest creation is introduced scurrying around the house, breaking things, hurling food and stabbing cadavers, like a rogue toddler. For Bella is a grown woman without inhibitions, without regret, without guilt, without shame, without a past to break free from. She is a quick learner, digesting everything that piques her curiosity. The more she learns, the more she realises how men define her and relate to her. Be it her overbearing father figure God, her lovestruck observer Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), the roguish lawyer/lover Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), the sadistic husband Alfie Blessington (Christopher Abbott), or the succession of clients she takes on when she decides to become “her own means of production.”

Speaking of production, the design team behind the sets and costumes of Poor Things not only translate Lanthimos’s intentions into a crystallised universe rich with meaning, they create a look so dynamic it becomes a key supporting character. Bella escapes London for picaresque adventures that take her from luxury hotels in Lisbon and Alexandria to an ocean liner on the Mediterranean to a bordello in Paris. Each location is an exaggerated carnival-mirror distortion of its real self, like a dark fantasy version from a fairy tale. Yellow skies and purple clouds and floating trams and phallic windows lend the feeling of being lost in a theme park — the theme being sexual awakening. The cumulative effect is of an encased bizarro realm designed to spur on Bella’s evolution, alchemising the cities’ geography and architecture into an aria to her increasing awareness.

At the start, Godwin’s home in London signals Bella’s sheltered existence. The low ceilings of the rooms, often framed via a fish-eye lens, heighten the disorientation of cabin fever. Colours erupt in raptures when Bella absorbs new experiences between sessions of furious jumping and strolls around the cobblestone streets of Lisbon. Reading books and meeting fellow travellers open whole new worlds and improve her articulation.

A brief stopover in Alexandria pits her naivety against the realities of the world. Bella befriends Harry Astley (Jerrod Carmichael), a cynic who shows her the misery of poverty in the slums below their swanky hotel, two worlds separated by a broken staircase. When she ends up at an unromanticised Paris, an extended stint at a bordello allows her to understand what feels good and what doesn’t, her desires and her boundaries. By the end of the globetrotting, she learns to take control of her life. She returns a liberated woman to London, her home not as discoloured and oppressive as when she had left it.

For Godwin, Bella is like a daughter figure who appeals to his God complex, a potentially crowning achievement of his legacy as a pioneering surgeon. For Max, she is the ideal wife: an attractive woman with the mind of an amenable child. For Duncan, she is the lover he can’t conquer, a failure which drives him to madness. For Alfie, she is the long-lost wife he drove to suicide, a woman whose sexuality he wishes to surgically sever so as to keep her compliant. By casting aside all the men seeking to control her, Bella becomes her own woman, no more a man-made creation.

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