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This raunchy Victorian steampunk coming-of-age tale has been feted by critics as a feminist masterpiece, an epithet also applied to hit-of-last-year Barbie. Clearly the Academy prefers Poor Things, bestowing upon it 11 nominations as opposed to Barbie’s eight, giving Yorgos Lanthimos a nod for best director and Emma Stone for best actress while snubbing Barbie’s director Greta Gerwig and star Margot Robbie.
These decisions baffle me – but then, how anyone could describe Poor Things as feminist baffles me. In fact, I consider this bizarre film, with all its sex, gore and general weirdness, one of the most misogynistic movies I’ve watched in recent years.
Based on the novel by the late Alasdair Gray, Poor Things is a subversive spin on Frankenstein. Bella Baxter (played by Stone) appears to have learning difficulties but we soon learn that she recently, while pregnant, took her life. She has been reanimated by Willem Dafoe’s disfigured Dr Frankenstein character (Godwin Baxter, nicknamed God, for laughs) with the help of the transplanted brain of her unborn child. So Bella has a young woman’s body but a baby’s brain and God is keen to keep his experiment under lock and key, chloroforming her when she tries to escape and planning to marry her off to his assistant to retain control over her. But he hasn’t bargained on Bella’s buccaneering spirit and lust for life and what follows is a coming-of-age story that takes us from fin de siècleLondon to Lisbon, Amsterdam, and Paris.
Having seen Lanthimos’s The Favourite, I was expecting plenty of boisterous bawdiness. What I wasn’t expecting was a woman’s journey from childlike innocence to worldly maturity boiled down to, pretty much, just sex. Yet according to Poor Things, what a woman really wants – when you get rid of social pressures and let her be free – is to bonk her way around Europe. Conveniently, that also means that audiences get to ogle Stone’s naked body in a never-ending stream of sex scenes, and titter away as she plunges a cucumber inside her “hairy business” to “make herself happy”. The obvious puerile glee in all of this is off-putting to say the least.
But it was when Bella pitches up in Paris, broke, and decides to become a sex worker that the film really lost me. Watching the luminous Stone in flagrante delicto with a parade of potato men is sickening. But really, it was the film’s presentation of sex work as a jolly side hustle that made my brain hurt.
When she joins the brothel, she explains her reasoning to the madam. “I have examined my situation,” she says, in her distinctive Bella-speak. “I need sex and money. I could take a lover… who would keep me, but may require an awful lot of attention or it’s 20 minutes at a time and the rest of my day is free to study.” And then we launch into a flurry of graphic sex scenes. Bella having sex with a man in front of his two sons as some sort of perverse sexual education (it was this scene that the British Board of Film Classifications ordered to be edited), Bella hanging from a ceiling with a bit in her mouth as a man humps her leg. This is interspersed with scenes of Bella taking anatomy classes at medical school and walking arm-in-arm with a fellow sex worker who she is also sleeping with – for enjoyment, not money, we assume.
This ludicrous imagining of sex work in a mysteriously disease-free brothel as the perfect engine for Bella’s exploration of the world and its ways is so outlandish and naive that it borders on the offensive. And what a male fantasy it is! Left to her own devices and free from societal shame, what do you know, the natural woman is a raging nymphomaniac up for sex at any time with anyone (no matter how potato-y) and hey, why not earn some dosh while she’s at it?
For all the focus on sex, I did note that there wasn’t a single mention of menstruation in this female bildungsroman. Orgasms play better on screen than periods, that’s for sure.
Poor Things is beautifully made, with fabulous costumery and sets, gorgeously shot, supremely acted, but what a phoney this film is. To see its (male) director nominated for an Oscar while Gerwig, who made a sincere attempt to show the female experience on screen with film Barbie, is passed over is a difficult pill to swallow.
To every critic lauding Poor Things as a feminist masterpiece: give me a break.
‘Poor Things’ is one of the most misogynistic films I’ve seen
Poor Things, a movie with sex scenes so graphic it had to be reedited to comply with UK law, looks set to clean up at the Oscars.This raunchy Victorian steampunk coming-of-age tale has been feted by critics as a feminist masterpiece, an epithet also applied to hit-of-last-year Barbie. Clearly the Academy prefers Poor Things, bestowing upon it 11 nominations as opposed to Barbie’s eight, giving Yorgos Lanthimos a nod for best director and Emma Stone for best actress while snubbing Barbie’s director Greta Gerwig and star Margot Robbie.
These decisions baffle me – but then, how anyone could describe Poor Things as feminist baffles me. In fact, I consider this bizarre film, with all its sex, gore and general weirdness, one of the most misogynistic movies I’ve watched in recent years.
Based on the novel by the late Alasdair Gray, Poor Things is a subversive spin on Frankenstein. Bella Baxter (played by Stone) appears to have learning difficulties but we soon learn that she recently, while pregnant, took her life. She has been reanimated by Willem Dafoe’s disfigured Dr Frankenstein character (Godwin Baxter, nicknamed God, for laughs) with the help of the transplanted brain of her unborn child. So Bella has a young woman’s body but a baby’s brain and God is keen to keep his experiment under lock and key, chloroforming her when she tries to escape and planning to marry her off to his assistant to retain control over her. But he hasn’t bargained on Bella’s buccaneering spirit and lust for life and what follows is a coming-of-age story that takes us from fin de siècleLondon to Lisbon, Amsterdam, and Paris.
Having seen Lanthimos’s The Favourite, I was expecting plenty of boisterous bawdiness. What I wasn’t expecting was a woman’s journey from childlike innocence to worldly maturity boiled down to, pretty much, just sex. Yet according to Poor Things, what a woman really wants – when you get rid of social pressures and let her be free – is to bonk her way around Europe. Conveniently, that also means that audiences get to ogle Stone’s naked body in a never-ending stream of sex scenes, and titter away as she plunges a cucumber inside her “hairy business” to “make herself happy”. The obvious puerile glee in all of this is off-putting to say the least.
But it was when Bella pitches up in Paris, broke, and decides to become a sex worker that the film really lost me. Watching the luminous Stone in flagrante delicto with a parade of potato men is sickening. But really, it was the film’s presentation of sex work as a jolly side hustle that made my brain hurt.
When she joins the brothel, she explains her reasoning to the madam. “I have examined my situation,” she says, in her distinctive Bella-speak. “I need sex and money. I could take a lover… who would keep me, but may require an awful lot of attention or it’s 20 minutes at a time and the rest of my day is free to study.” And then we launch into a flurry of graphic sex scenes. Bella having sex with a man in front of his two sons as some sort of perverse sexual education (it was this scene that the British Board of Film Classifications ordered to be edited), Bella hanging from a ceiling with a bit in her mouth as a man humps her leg. This is interspersed with scenes of Bella taking anatomy classes at medical school and walking arm-in-arm with a fellow sex worker who she is also sleeping with – for enjoyment, not money, we assume.
This ludicrous imagining of sex work in a mysteriously disease-free brothel as the perfect engine for Bella’s exploration of the world and its ways is so outlandish and naive that it borders on the offensive. And what a male fantasy it is! Left to her own devices and free from societal shame, what do you know, the natural woman is a raging nymphomaniac up for sex at any time with anyone (no matter how potato-y) and hey, why not earn some dosh while she’s at it?
For all the focus on sex, I did note that there wasn’t a single mention of menstruation in this female bildungsroman. Orgasms play better on screen than periods, that’s for sure.
Poor Things is beautifully made, with fabulous costumery and sets, gorgeously shot, supremely acted, but what a phoney this film is. To see its (male) director nominated for an Oscar while Gerwig, who made a sincere attempt to show the female experience on screen with film Barbie, is passed over is a difficult pill to swallow.
To every critic lauding Poor Things as a feminist masterpiece: give me a break.
