Five years later FavoriteLanthimos with Poor things was expected at the gate: the success of the first in terms of critics, audiences and awards was such that it was able to attract the attention of an extremely large audience, joining the handful of foreign authors who were alumni of the Hollywood industry.
If with Favorite there was a strong sense of compromise and limitation, which led to only a jolly trio of actresses appearing at court. Poor things His first real staged work, Stars and Stripes, seems to have rediscovered his own raison d’être, the motivation to define himself as an important part of the director’s filmography, in a delicate balance between breakup and proud belonging to the system.
In this film, Lanthimos looks back at his cinema, resurrecting, for example, the theme of “families as prisons”, the fulcrum kynodontasbut also a taste of dystopian worldbuilding Lobsterswaying him to fantasy and moving into territories close to the eyes of Terry Gilliam and the more defeatist Tim Burton.
In this amusing satire, the Pinocchio archetype is subverted again, as well as the even more direct archetype of Frankenstein’s monster, through Emma Stone’s Bella Baxter, a director’s puppet and star performer in a one-man show of screams. and verses of each type. Bringing an empty shell to the screen, anxiously waiting for the world to imprint on it, Lanthimos spares no targets to attack with the innocent look of his protagonist, who becomes more insightful as the minutes go by.
In a world of traps, injustices, and men’s morbid dependence on women, the solution is to break out of the stereotypical prison erected by social conventions to form one’s own new and complex identity construct, an outcome that is only possible through the experience of the world. Whether it’s our own or the film’s vivid oversaturated fantasy, Poor thingshow a recent blockbuster dressed in pink celebrates these values by questioning the distinction between creation and creator.
Pictured above: Emma Stone in the movie “Poor Man”