Yorgos Lanthimos experiments with the feeling of pity
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The Wretched Ones, a steampunk tale about Frankenstein’s granddaughter that just won four Oscars, including Best Actress for Emma Stone, has hit streaming platforms. Ruthless explorer of human emotions, Yorgos Lanthimos, this time tells the story of pity.
A woman in a blue dress flies from a bridge into blue water. In the black and white world of conventionally Victorian London, a girl with a wild look plucks the piano keys with her hands and feet. She can’t speak yet, but she’s learning quickly. The same girl in a Victorian dress, but in a miniskirt, leaves her lover on the acid-colored streets of Lisbon to devour as many cakes as she can fit in and vomit them all. She grows up, she discovers sex, poverty, philosophy, Alexandria, a Parisian brothel, bad lovers, girlfriends, socialism. The only thing she cannot discover for herself is shame. And really, it’s better without him.
The great scientist Godwin Baxter, who teaches anatomy and in his spare time conducts experiments on animals and dissects corpses, receives the body of a pregnant woman who has just died with a still living child inside. What to do? The solution is obvious – transplant the woman’s brain from her unborn daughter and resuscitate the body. Godwin himself is sewn on a living thread; he cannot even take food without connecting himself to some kind of apparatus for the production of gastric juice. Once upon a time, Godwin’s father, an equally great scientist, performed various experiments on his son – why? “To find out something no one knew,” Godwin explains. Now he, too, strives for new knowledge.
And here before us is the beautiful Bella Baxter, a woman with the brain of a baby, developing at incredible speed. She simply calls Godwin God, that is, God; in the Russian translation of the novel by Scotsman Alasdair Gray, on which the film was based, his name was Boglow. Bella happily runs around her ideal kindergarten, God reads bedtime stories to her, strange animals run around the house – chicken pigs and dogs with goose heads, instead of toys she has corpses that can be poked with a scalpel. Bella agrees to marry God’s assistant, but first decides to see the world with a sneaky lawyer. Along the way, she will find out that the only thing both men and women want is to limit the freedom of other men and women.
Yorgos Lanthimos, the curator of the Kunstkamera, makes sociopathic films, endlessly fascinating, very beautiful. Wild. All his films are anthropological experiments, dogs with goose heads, hybrid people devoid of unnecessary feelings. More precisely, reduced to some one-sided feelings: the brilliant “Fang”, an experiment in raising an ideal family, tells the story of obedience. The Lobster, which made Lanthimos a star, tells a love story. “Favorite”, the predecessor to The Poor Miserables, is about jealousy. All these feelings are ripped out of a person, placed in cones and jars, and Lanthimos enthusiastically watches how these freaks try to move. His films are by no means psychological studies; Lanthimos hates it when actors ask him about the psychological motivations of their characters. There is no psychological motivation, here’s the world for you – live, don’t mess yourself up.
“The Poor Miserables” tells a story of pity. If you see in the film only a statement about the freedom of a woman, about the bonds that entangle her in a society consisting exclusively of men, it will be a stupid, one-sided movie reduced to a circus. Bella triumphantly and with some sadistic pleasure pities all these men, some too much. Looking for a femme manifesto here is like looking for it in von Trier’s “Nymphomaniac” or in Jeunet’s “Amelie.” Looking for a love story here, even self-love, is like looking for it in a Parisian brothel. Pity is what drives Bella, pity and curiosity.
The novel “The Wretched Poor” by Scotsman Alasdair Gray was published in 1992; Bella Baxter in the novel personified, among other things, Scotland – and Gray emphasized that he always wrote about the “disrespected” features of Scotland. The novel was a gloomy postmodern toy, cut, like Frankenstein’s monster, from “certain Victorian novels.” Lanthimos was delighted with the novel, met Gray while working on Dogtooth and received the film rights.
“Fang,” by the way, ends with the girl, who has blindly obeyed her father all her life and never left the garden, escaping into the big world in the trunk of her father’s car. The last shot of the film is a closed trunk: will it come out? Afraid?
Bella Baxter sets out into the big world without a moment’s hesitation. She is not afraid of anything, this is the fearlessness of a child who has not yet been broken, the fearlessness of a woman who cannot be subdued, the fearlessness of a human body that has already known death and now wants cakes.
Emma Stone, who plays Bella, is a child, a woman, a cardboard bride, an object, a person, a “hole”, a set of bones, glands and organs, a magical artifact, a prize and a murder weapon – all at the same time. She learns to walk, learns to listen to her body, learns to have fun. Doesn’t learn from his mistakes because he doesn’t think of them as mistakes.
Lanthimos assembled brilliant actors. Shakespearean strength from Katherine Hunter (the witches in Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth), Mark Ruffalo as a super macho/super soulmate (much more fun than his Hulk), the incredible Hanna Schygulla talking about self-gratification, Ramy Youssef looking like a young Karl Marx here, and in the Ramy series, doing exactly the same thing that Bella is doing in The Poor Miserables – “I want to know who I am, I want to explore the world.” And of course, Willem Dafoe is both the Year and the son and Frankenstein’s monster. They all have fun and cry in the booth, but they cannot go beyond the booth. It’s not their problem: that’s how Yorgos Lanthimos’s world works.
This whole big world was filmed on a soundstage, the sets were built by hand (hello “And the Ship Sails On” by Fellini), filming was carried out using retro technologies like wide-screen VistaVision cameras (hello “Vertigo” by Hitchcock): Lanthimos believes that the old-fashioned filming technique is “the most beautiful, the most convincing, and in some ways the most humane and tactile.”
At least there should be something human in his films.
Lanthimos believes that this is a movie about a second chance – the heroine can start everything from scratch, without experiencing any remorse, and without even understanding what conscience is. But with the same success we can consider that this is a film about how if you live without shame and social boundaries, sooner or later you will become a socialist. Or about how a creator feels when he releases his creation into a world full of sugar and violence.
“The Poor Miserables” is partly Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland” with socialism instead of the monarchy, partly “Moulin Rouge” with sex adventures instead of musical numbers, there is the sadistic innocence of “Amelie”, and the prim melancholy of Greenaway, and questions to God from Terry Gilliam – for some reason you can’t think of “The Poor Miserables” as a separate work, they always remind you of something. This is a luxurious, riotous, baroque circus, a puppet theater funny to tears – and the point of the show is not that the puppet Bella Baxter becomes human (although references to Pinocchio can also be found here). She becomes the main cog on which this whole world rests, the key that can move it from its place.
For what? To find out that all men are assholes.
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