By Sandra Hall
POOR THINGS ★★★★
(MA) 141 minutes
The raunchiest efforts of Bridgerton’s creators pale into insignificance when compared with the assaults Australian screenwriter Tony McNamara and Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos have made on the stuffier conventions of the period picture.
Emma Stone plays Bella, a young woman who is brought back to life with the brain of an unborn child.
McNamara is showrunner on The Great, the TV series that performed a radical makeover on the reputation of Russia’s storied empress, Catherine. He also co-wrote the script for Lanthimos’ award-winner The Favourite, which did an equally eye-opening job on Britain’s Queen Anne.
Now McNamara and Lanthimos have teamed up to deliver a wildly anarchic take on the Frankenstein myth, with a feminist message to be found amid the mayhem by those who care to look.
It’s a 19th-century tale with Emma Stone, star of The Favourite, cast as Bella, a young woman who commits suicide after becoming pregnant. Her corpse is then recovered by Dr Godwin Baxter, a Scottish doctor who brings her back to life by replacing her brain with that of her unborn child. She may look like a woman, but she behaves like a toddler on the verge of a tantrum. Her motor skills also need work. When we first meet her, she’s walking like an imperfectly articulated robot.
Mark Ruffalo plays womanising lawyer Duncan Wedderburn, who runs off with Emma Stone’s Bella.
To say the least, she and the doctor make an odd couple. He’s played by Willem Dafoe, whose face has been decorated with an array of scars so elaborate he looks as if his features have been slapped together with mismatched chunks of putty.
The story has been adapted by McNamara from the 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray, a Scottish writer who died two years before the film was made. By then, he had given Lanthimos his blessing, possibly because they shared the same taste for shaking up historical perspectives.
Lanthimos ushers you into the film’s weird world with the startling originality of the cinematography. The early scenes are played out in black and white and framed as if seen through a fish-eye lens. Then, as Bella matures and her adventures begin to unfold, Lanthimos and his cinematographer, Robbie Ryan, switch to a candy-colour palette used to painterly effect. The exteriors are shot against lurid skies with racing clouds and the sets have the stylised looks of a children’s picture book. The action within them, however, has a distinctly adult tilt. Bella has a lively curiosity about sex and McNamara has a lot of fun helping her to express it with some very wacky dialogue.
Having become engaged to the doctor’s mild-mannered assistant, Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), she decides to have a little fun before marriage and takes off with a womanising lawyer, Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), travelling with him to Portugal, Paris and London with an extended stay aboard a cruise ship.
In every sense, it’s a highly educational trip and the wisdom she’s attained by the end of it enables the wilful child to become her own woman. She’s an extraordinary character in an extraordinary film made by a director so at ease with the language of cinema that he can produce wonders with it.
Poor Things is released in cinemas on December 26.
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