If this review had been originally written in English, it would have been titled And God Created Woman, since Roger Vadim’s Et Dieu… créa la femme (1956) was titled in that language. The English title of this text seemed very appropriate for two reasons. First, it pays direct homage to the woman played by Brigitte Bardot in that French film, a young orphan on the Riviera living under her own code of conduct, guided by her sexual desires and immune to the social excesses of the time. just like Bella Baxter, the protagonist of Poor Things (Poor Things, 2023), does. And the second reason is real: in reality, Dr. Godwin “God” Baxter was the one who created Bella from the corpse of a 25-year-old woman who committed suicide by throwing herself into the river. Godwin, Dr. Unlike Frankenstein, he did not use corpse parts, instead replacing Belle’s brain with another newborn brain.
The true story of Bella Baxter was told to us by Alasdair Gray in his novel Poor Creatures, published in 1992 and subtitled Episodes from the Early Life of Archibald McCandles MD, Chief Public Health Officer for Scotland. The book weaves its own mythology, for, as we are told, in the seventies of the 20th century the historian Michael Donnelly found McCandles’ manuscript and other relevant documents discarded like rubbish in some boxes on a platform in the center of Glasgow. Donnelly knew Alasdair Gray and suggested editing all the material. If we stick to the play (and we should), Poor Creatures – the book – is essentially a history written in the first person by Archibald McCandles, interspersed with anatomical drawings (he was a doctor), portraits, and letters from other characters.
Pleasure, joy and power
This is the story of a scientific and surgical genius: his Scottish surgeon friend Dr. Godwin Baxter was performing anatomical experiments on animals, but when he gave “life” to Bella, a woman, in 1881, maintaining her vital functions after her suicide and changing her brain, he made his greatest work. Thus, Bella is a woman “newly born” into the world at the age of 25 and therefore does not carry any cultural or social stigmas or prejudices, and everything she learns she receives from the free-thinking mentor who takes her on a journey. To nourish oneself with experiences that allow one to expand one’s mind and the world intuitively. Her brain gradually reaches the age of her body, and Bella discovers herself as a woman and, in doing so, finds a source of pleasure, joy, and power in sex. It’s absolutely devastating and offensive for the time. “No normal healthy woman – no good or healthy woman – desires or expects to enjoy sexual intercourse except as a duty. Even pagan philosophers understood that men were energetic sowers and good women were peaceful fields. In De Rerum Natura, Lucretius tells us only that women are women.” says women shake their hips,” says another doctor, Dr. Prickett. Bella Baxter stood up against this. Now Yorgos Lanthimos enters this story.
Expressionism, Lynch, Fellini…
While filming The Favorite (2018), Lanthimos knew that Alasdair Gray’s novel was a huge and complex work when he told the film’s screenwriter, Australian author Tony McNamara, that he was considering making an adaptation of Poor Creatures next. So while writing the script (his first adaptation) the perspective changed: now the protagonists would be Bella and her own experience. To do this, McNamara vastly simplifies the original story (purists will be disappointed by the film’s final twist) and turns it into a road movie of sorts, with fresh-eyed Bella (a strong Emma Stone) all over the place. , he is learning to know the world, he is gaining self-awareness and his sexual appetite is increasing, those “furious leaps” that he enjoys so much and are enlightening for him.
Lanthimos presented the film as the beginning of a baroque era where production design was everything. It’s part expressionist film (there are echoes of Caligari and Metropolis here), part institutionalism cinema a la Cronenberg and Lynch, part retrofuturist fiction where the organic architecture of Antonio Gaudi and Victor Horta meets the surrealism of Max Ernst. When all these are brought together and viewed through fish-eye lenses, a visual feast emerges, ranging from the black and white of German horror cinema to the saturated colors that fill the environments and the sky. We know that this ship carrying Bella and her lover, the little boy Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), has no intention of looking real – as we know in maestro Fellini’s And the Ship Goes (E la nave va, 1983) – but the rules of the game We understand and let ourselves go with the flow. A film by Yorgos Lanthimos, this is his narrative and visual universe. In the same sense, Bella’s wardrobe by Holly Waddington is also harmonious and evolves with Bella’s development. Blouses with giant shoulder pads, ribcages to increase volume, and a tendency for all her clothes to look like part of an anatomy: a vagina.
Despite everything, the poor creatures look like a living organism. An unyielding, difficult-to-control creature, but not a shy director, Lanthimos never loses track of what he wants to tell us and what he wants to satirize from social, political and patriarchal perspectives. Bella’s salvation is described joyfully, through the uncontrollable power of orgasm. Sometimes chaotic, sometimes incomprehensible, sometimes mysterious, sometimes sensual, sometimes angry… Poor Creatures is a women’s film and it explains and justifies everything.