The recently concluded Venice Film Festival gave us the heroine we were looking for after Barbie and something more, awarding the gorgeous Poor creatures! Yorgos Lanthimos. Let’s put it this way: we would all like to be Bella Baxterthe main character played by Emma Stone with an electric charge, which makes it unique. This black-and-white and vibrant color film represents the extreme madness of a great and cruel author who is tormented by nightmares that become hypnotic images. At the beginning is book by Alasdair Gray Stone has co-produced the film since 1992, and its female perspective certainly stands out. The main character clearly commits suicide in the first scene, and we find her as a mechanical doll in the mansion of Dr. Godwin, Willem Dafoe with a face stitched together like a puzzle, another mad scientist who, in order to revive Bella, activated the brain of the fetus she was carrying in the womb. She, starting from the breastfeeding phase, is slowly reborn with the gestures, broken tongue and lack of tact of a puppet and, above all, a woman without a past, and therefore without prejudices and taboos. Free to openly violate the laws of patriarchy, without exception, especially the laws of modesty.
We are in Victorian style with a gothic and even futuristic touch: Bella, in a series of daring scenes praising Stone’s reckless interpretive power, accidentally discovers, thanks to a fruit, autoeroticism and immediately leaves with a seductive libertine, a magnificent Mark Ruffalo, which guarantees her the “wonderful leaps” (in bed and elsewhere) that she craves, having just discovered them. Anything would happen to the poor guy, he was so self-confident and pompous, and he would become Bella’s love slave, who would destroy him. Applause.
Our heroine frankly doesn’t care, wanders from Lisbon to Alexandria, discovers poverty and socialism, as he develops, his language and demeanor become receptive. Finally, penniless and without useless thoughts, she discovers in Paris that sex can be turned into money, and finds herself a conscientious prostitute in a brothel, free and independent at last, mistress of the male world that created her. The original evil, the cruel husband, will be avenged in a mocking and very dark ending, which we will not talk about.
Liberty Bella BaxterFrankenstein’s creature, with a female identity stripped of all social trappings, a blank slate on which she herself traces her destiny, is a wonderful apologist for the present day and gender politics. And a whole book should be written about clothing and costumes as frankly unprincipled as Bella, about refurbishment and recycling of fabrics, crinolines and vintage fashion to transform them into modern designer Holly Waddington seductions. Shocking, feminist and, with some courage, worthy of copying. Definitely worth a look.
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