Poor Things - Boldest Uniqueness I REVIEW
Poor Things - Boldest Uniqueness
13/08/2024
By: Logos Review
(Light Spoilers Ahead)
When i ask for movies to be shot in an interesting presentation, this is kind of exactly what i mean: maybe the best-looking Terry Giliam picture to date and is not even directed by him.
Laying the ground for the vision
A directing that really is not afraid to pull interesting unique angles, color palettes, camera movement, music, paired with a delightful art direction and prepare yourself to be transported into an entirely new world.
Beyond stylization, the coordination of artistry was so robust here that it has culminated into what i would define as an aesthetic of its own, so unique that some may be turned away, processing it as nothing but weirdness... If you are one of those who stay, though, you will likely find this largely fascinating, highly stimulating, and pretty fucking funny.
Screenplay
Employing a very special Victorian-esque aesthetic specled with archaic biological sci-fi clearly inspired by, yet not exactly adapting a text like Frakenstein (As the script is adapted from a book of the same name), Poor Things is also unafraid of mythologizing by its own authority for its own modern purposes, having come up with a satirical deconstruction on the ‘born sexy yesterday’ trope, of which we see the different stages in *no pun intended* interesting new angles, as if conceived by a devilishly sardonic voice that only keeps asking “what would be the most messed up way for things to show on screen”: what if the main character is hot yet mentally impaired and pees on the floor? What if the experiment that created her is a literalization of the movie’s thesis?... The only one capable of such a thing, would be an equally fucked up man. And a woman like her, in a world like ours, would indeed sooner or later end up in a whore-house.
Mostly a gleeful satire, in truth spirited by a blunt posture, strikingly thought provoking, and technically flawless, the story is far more than ambitious than a mere saltire as we get to see basically the entire developement of a person’s brain. It's one of those stories that make you question things you've always taken for granted. While Bella discovers the world for the first time, you discover it for a second one, and it is damn powerful. I loved that clímax where Bella discovers social inequality.
Exposition is delivered expertly as in the ‘night time story’ scene. The plot unfolds perfectly and every stage of the process feels like it was developed neither too swiftly nor slowly, as Goldilocks would say, just right. Free will, aliveness, language, what we consider dumb vs smart, gender roles, the building up of social conduct and of course sexuality, pretty much everything the script could juice out, they did. No moment is wasted, every chance to build character and bring personality is taken.
There is much and more moments of both small and big brilliance to praise in this absolute achievement of a screenplay: bizarre as it gets yet simultaneously somehow cute and wholesome. Emma Stone could not have done the material more perfectly hers, she is a joy to watch in a full bodied, lovable goofball show-woman performance that might be her best to date, arguably the same for Mark Ruffalo, and shoutout to that whore-house owner lady, she was amazing. I hadn't encountered such memorable secondary characters since reading A Song of Ice and Fire.
Hell, even the dialogue could easily have been a boring slingshotting of modernized crap. Yet not only did they honor the Victorian-esque períod dialect but even in there they had fun putting to test the social threshold of "smart", as per the fucked up shit that gets said with the most elegant words by the seemingly mentally challenged Bella. There is a mine of authenticity to be found here… Ahem- i wish some people *House of the Dragon*, would learn something.
Reflections
Poor Things is really not afraid of experimenting and sharing it's weirdness with the world, why? because it's also wickedly aware of how much more interesting that makes it. An adorable smugness if you will, perfectly embodied in Emma Stone’s leading role: Free, weird, and even at the end of her arc, healthily innocent to what the world may think of her yet cunning, and never in shame of herself. Her downsides are also her strenght.
Most appropiately, a duel between change vs social acceptance is one of the film’s central themes, perfectly laid out in a literal dual between what belongs in Bella’s house and what comes from without with a promise of freedom.
A free mind with a free material, only such a douple could have portrayed the sexuality–angle as freely yet classy as it was, even then brimming with artistic purpose.
If i had to complain, it would be that at points (like 58:50) the picture is too reliant on a Marvel-like quirky humour just to extract a quick positive reaction from the viewer. And some small use of CGI (the eruct bubbles) looked distractingly bad; Hey, now this really is a Terry Gilliam picture after all.
Otherwise, everything else was exceptional. Even the production design gets to shine with a brilliant funny moment with the stagecoach this family “drives”, and that music, which oh god, legitimately exposed me to sounds and emotions i didn’t even knew existed.
Verdict
Its incredible weirdness is far beyond what our present quality standards can take.
But its not that the movie is entirely alien, merely the creative direction is so inventive in the way of getting there: the world of its own far beyond ours in which there lay Poor Things. That is one exciting destination to take the ship of cinema into.
9.5/10
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