You will read everywhere that Poor Yorgos Lanthimos’s being is a kind of Frankenstein woman, and this time a journalistic simplification couldn’t be more appropriate. Based on the novel by Alasdair Gray, reprinted today in Italy by Safar. Poor beings its protagonist is not only a beautiful woman (Emma Stone) brought back to life by a not quite balanced scientist (Willem Dafoe), but he develops from the point of view of, one might say, purely feminine spirituality.
Myself Frankenstein Mary Shelley is a dark drama about the tragedy of creation from a male perspective, obsessed with ownership and control, there are two men (Lantimos and screenwriter Tony McNamara, Cruella AND Favorite between the credits) respond with a dark, dirty, exaggerated comedy about the miracle of creativity, in a feminine tone of liberation and exploration of the body, transformation, rebirth.
Following a scientific procedure that I won’t reveal in this spoiler-obsessed age, Bella Baxter is essentially a two-year-old child in the body of Emma Stone, protected and housebound by the brilliantly insane Dr. Godwin Baxter (nickname: God), Willem. Defoe, with a face cut with huge scars, as if someone had broken and then badly glued his skull, broken man in a film that creates a repetitive visual motif of pieces and seams.
The film begins with Bella’s emancipation from her own ugly creator in an outside world where nothing is realistic, but thanks to one of the creators’ many sensible decisions, it veers Frankenstein’s gothic towards a kind of steampunk-style retrofuturism, like a novel. Jules Verne with illustrations by Villemart. In other words, the territory of fear is captured and turned into a territory of wonder and adventure.
The poor creatures that gave this libertarian emancipation story its name are people who, one by one, with good or bad intentions, try to take over Bella’s innocence, but instead find themselves overwhelmed and somehow castrated: “No wonder God is impotent. It will not escape the attentive viewer that Bella welcomes the protection and guidance of men only to overcome them and reach a new place of growth: she learns love from the scientist, promiscuity from the fanatic, commitment from the libertine, and compassion from the cynic. . Lanthimos loves to play with the deceptive image of the loss of innocence (bursting soap bubbles) to reverse it and tell us that innocence is a fantasy of male control that does not exist in reality or exists only at the end of a path that crosses all sorts of temptations and compromises.
Poor The creature is a celebration of knowledge, adventure, curiosity: it is no coincidence that at the beginning we are told several times that what we will witness is a “scientific experiment”, an experiment that seems monstrous and instead goes against all expectations associated with genre, it will turn out to be successful, saving both for the subject and for the scientist. This is an Enlightenment film that celebrates empiricism, skepticism, the experimental method that separates Victorian hypocrisy from a deep sense of civilization. This is a film that is based on dichotomies and takes sides without hesitation: free will over fate, courage over fear, love over property, beauty (Bella) over conquest (Victoria), pleasure over convention, personality change.
Bella’s path is to reach the spiritual age and language appropriate to her adult body. When she succeeds, she also rediscovers the childish sense of play, but first she has to go through excess, boredom, pain. “Degradation, horror, sadness – that’s what makes us whole,” tells her the best or at least the most honest among her mentors, the only woman who owns a Parisian brothel, where she has been prostituting for some time.
Therefore, the final exposure of this anti-horror is inevitable. Monsters exist, we are or were us, creating ourselves (in this case, well, literally), so the question that makes sense to ask ourselves is not how we were created, but: we can improve? Poor beings he replies that yes, we can and should at every moment of our lives. A message we desperately need in our day.
Born in Genoa on the day Truman Capote died in Bel Air, after a long process of self-awareness, he came to terms with the idea that it was just a coincidence. A graduate of International Relations and a Holden alumnus, he has worked extensively in European institutions and in his spare time has written for Last Man, Minima and Moralia, Pandora and other newspapers. In 2018, he joined Esquire Italia, where he is now Managing Editor of the digital magazine. He has also written two books and several screenplays.