2023-09-01 22:42:34
The Venice Festival brings luck to Yorgos Lanthimos. The Greek director, who surprised everyone with Caninethe prize race of The favourite in 2018. He won the Grand Jury Prize (the second in importance the year he Roma took the Golden Lion); and also the Volpi Cup for Best Actress for Olivia Colman, an award that she would later repeat at the Oscars, where the film received 10 nominations. It was also the beginning of everything for Emma Stone, winner of the Volpi for Best Actress for La La Land in 2016 and the Hollywood Academy Award a few months later.
Perhaps for this reason it seems logical that it is in the Lido where they present poor creatures their new collaboration together after The favourite (and with a new one already shot). They both want this to be the start of a new awards season for both of them, and it just might. Perhaps this adaptation of the novel Alasdair Gray (Poor creatures! Episodes from the youth of Dr. Archibald McCandless, Public Health Officer. Anagrama 1996) is not as complete as his review of the figure of Ana Estuardo, but poor creatures it has many elements that can make it an equally satisfying career: a visual form that is as brilliant as it is gimmicky; a superb main interpretation and a look at original feminism and with a provocative point.
if in The favourite, which also had Tony McNamara in the script, analyzed power relations using Queen Anne as a trompe l’oeil; here he uses the classic Frankenstein to deliver a vision from a woman’s point of view. Yes, we already know that Frankenstein was really the doctor and not the creature, but in the collective imagination it happens the other way around, when one mentions ‘Frankenstein’ it is the monster that appears in the brain. If not, tell the PP, which has been saying ‘Frankenstein Government’ for years to refer to the coalition government and continues to be committed to error.
Here that Frankenstein is an Emma Stone reborn thanks to the figure of a mad scientist with gases (literally) played humanely by Willem Dafoe. She is a girl in a woman’s body and lives locked up so as not to face her with the real world. When her creator grants her the wish to leave her outside, she will have to integrate into a world of which she does not know the rules. Stone’s character has no social skills, and her mental age doesn’t match her body, causing her to behave unexpectedly.
Therein lies part of Lanthimos’ ‘joke’, in placing a character who can say what he wants, act without moral or social ties and be both provocative and hilarious. She gets it, but the joke ends soon. poor creatures It starts out amazing, but little by little it loses all its strength and becomes an experience full of brilliant moments, but also an irregular work. The script insists on repeating the strategy over and over again until it is exhausted.
Sexuality appears in the character’s learning. Emma Stone’s hormones soon unleash, and she begins an arsenal of scenes in which her character masturbates with the first thing she catches, because, in case it hadn’t been clear up to that moment, since she doesn’t have any social norms that govern her behavior, does not know that this is morally frowned upon. She talks about sex, practices it and frees herself in a wild way, which on screen is something new for a while, but she tastes like chewed gum again when the resource is repeated.
Of course, we must be grateful that there is an actress like Emma Stone at the helm of such a character, who takes risks in a complicated role that could have fallen into parody and in which she spends naked and saying wild things almost all the time of the movie. She can see that she enjoys it and that she is 100% committed to the project. She manages to get a complicated tone, something that Mark Ruffalo doesn’t do as the man who shows him the world, excessively cartoonish and parodic.
Lanthimos himself spoke about the actress and the sex scenes at the film’s press conference, which did not include the actress due to the performers’ strike, but did include the entire technical team. The Greek director said that for him “it was very important not to make a film that was prudish, because it would be like completely betraying the main character.” “We had to make sure that Emma shouldn’t be ashamed of her body, her nudity or participating in those scenes, and she immediately understood that,” he added.
Lanthimos repeats here the visual obsessions of The favourite, and it happens the same as with his narrative bet. One also ends up tired of its visual baroque. There are the fish eyes, the dissonant music, the aberrational shots, the overloaded artistic direction and the saturated photography. A sought-after artificiality and so pending to be matched in each frame that it also ends up tiring. Perhaps Lanthimos is judged too harshly, and it is true that there are poor creatures talent and genius, but it begins to sound like something already seen that cries out to move somewhere.
Where poor creatures It is most satisfying is in its portrayal of all kinds of machismo that a woman suffers in her life. From the paternalism of her creator, the toxic romanticism of the ally, the explicit violence of the abuser, the supposed indifference of the canallita controller… and thus an innumerable list. Something that is reaffirmed in that wonderful final shot where he imagines a new, better world in the form of matriarchy and where Lanthimos does finally point to something new in his career (and which can already be seen in Emma Stone’s revealing conversation with the Jerod Carmichael’s character): in this world it’s time to put aside nihilism and cynicism and bet on optimism to change things.
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