A man underwent a goat brain transplant. Is this good or moral? It’s hard to say right away. To answer this question, you need to watch Yorgos Lanthimos’ extraordinary film “The Wretched Poor”.
The film received Golden Globes in two categories, including Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy, and four Oscars, one of which awarded Emma Stone the Best Actress award. Variety magazine chose The Lost Ones as the movie of the year. In general, there is a lot to talk about.
Author Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel “Poor Les Miserables” reimagines Shelley’s famous “Frankenstein” along postmodernist lines: a very specific but undoubtedly brilliant scientist creates something profoundly contradictory.
In Lanthimos’ film, Emma Stone becomes this contradictory character. A scientist played by Willem Dafoe finds the body of a pregnant girl who supposedly drowned in the River Thames of Victorian London. She could have played the girl, but why? It’s clear: Something made him throw himself off the bridge, break away from his life. So is it necessary to bring him back to this life? Instead, the intellectual decides to create a new personality by transplanting his unborn child’s brain into the girl.
In this movie, everything is somehow connected to cutting, tearing, sewing. Godwin Baxter (Dafoe) himself was reshaped as a child by his brilliant father – his face is a mass of scars and geometric distortions, his testicles, he says, have been burned with iron and his gastrointestinal tract has been externalised. Roughly made pig dogs and Kuroovites wander around the scientist’s house, he rides around the city in a steam car to which a horse’s head is nailed, and he himself examines corpses all day.
And so he creates the beautiful Bella; a speaking name. An adult woman with a baby brain moves like a complex cripple, speaks in fragments, urinates on herself, but develops very quickly. Speech becomes clearer and more complex, movements become more graceful, and most importantly, Bella discovers masturbation, which becomes a giant step towards self-discovery. The professor asks his best student to observe Bella, which naturally leads to a romantic relationship with marriage in the future. But then a devious lawyer appears and seduces the intellectually immature Bella and takes her to Lisbon and then around the world.
This must all be pretty boring actually. The plot is seasoned with a trite and even trendy modern agenda: A woman’s path to self-discovery, my body is my business, women’s best friends are black prostitutes, men are unquestionably evil, and only the one who is ready to serve can do it. good, and the person who is already inactive is conditionally good.
But at over two hours the film not only manages to be boring, it captures you like a truly great work of art that you can discuss, look for flaws in, but is hard to ignore.
The most important component of the film is the art direction. With this feature, it is not surprising that the film won another Oscar. The trick for the production designer (her name is Shauna Heath, but there are no Wikipedia articles about her) is to make everything precise and approximate at the same time. The cities in his design are recognizable but cannot be fully reproduced. It’s like a fantasy on the theme of this or that city – here are the clippings of Notre Dame, here are the Lisbon azulejos (Portuguese tiles. – socialbites.ca)Here is a view of the Egyptian ruins.
Thus, the landscape does not attract attention and does not become the main thing in the frame, while remaining quite impressive. The surrounding costumes seem to be made in an original way – maid’s aprons, ladies’ dresses, gentleman’s frock coats, and therefore the absurd clothes of the main character – shorts and a dress with puffy sleeves – shine against their background. The viewer sees that he’s not exactly a stranger, but at least he’s not from here. The snow in the Paris square is deliberately theatrical, and this feeling is exacerbated by the fact that a funeral procession is passing through the snow in the background, silhouetted in black.
As for the action, it seems to be divided by a paradoxical slice in its semantic component – the heroine is at the same time deliberately sexualized (she works in a brothel and in general knows herself almost exclusively through sex, until she begins to get carried away by socialism) and at the same time all external data somehow surprisingly asexual. In his relations with other people he is half-dead, acting in line with his own interests, of which he is not yet aware.
In this story, as is now customary in heroic cinema, everyone is a little psycho – remember “Joker” or “Wednesday”. Everyone is broken from the very beginning and will no longer come together as full-fledged classic heroes with noble impulses; everyone must oppose each other, but not for the sake of a high goal, but for the sake of self-realization. Self-actualization and self-knowledge are the new gods of extreme individualism.
It’s probably worth noting, just to avoid spoilers, that Bella, despite all the ground she’s traveled, has arrived at a very bourgeois life where her husband serves cocktails to her and her friend and her former tormentor mows the lawn. grass. Did I mention that a man had a sheep brain transplanted into him?
The author expresses his personal opinion, which may not coincide with the position of the editors.