“Poor Things”: Emma Stone is brilliant as shamelessness personified

Simone Meier

Anyone who has ever read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein knows how much you can love a monster. How much one feels and suffers when Frankenstein’s creature, made up of corpses, gradually comes to his senses and desperately tries to move among people, even though all they feel is fear and disgust. And how the monster, with the miserable existence bestowed upon him by a megalomaniac scientist, eventually becomes vengeful. He is possibly the poorest outcast in literary history. A poor thing. A poor thing.

The Greek Yorgos Lanthimos tells his Frankenstein story differently. For him, the eponymous ‘Poor Things’ are only partially deplorable. Because his monsters evolve to a level astonishingly superior to that of humans, even superhuman.

One monster is not actually one, it just looks like one. The London physician Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), simply God, is himself the son of a doctor. As with his father, all life is for him a possible object of empirical investigation. He himself was his father’s favorite research subject, his body material for various experiments that damaged him forever. Inside and outside. His broken face scares people. That is why he only dares to approach them in the lecture hall and at his home.

The house in turn is a paradise of what is humanly possible and his form of expression is collage: he has put together his pets of different species, they are, so to speak, Moitié-Moitié, for example there is a goose’s head on the body of a dog and barks at himself. The decor is wildest steampunk, Victorian-looking retro-futurism, beautiful, a fairytale in itself. Expanding Art Nouveau with meaningful organic shapes meets all kinds of remarkable machines. The sky is populated by Dadaist, floating objects.

However, God’s greatest creation is Bella Baxter, a young woman with a precocious mind, a suicidal woman who pulled Baxter out of the Thames, planted her unborn baby’s brain in her head and – as Dr. Frankenstein – reanimated with electricity. Bella is beautiful, only a scar on her neck gives away the procedure. And Bella’s fetal brain is developing rapidly: she has just learned to talk, she is now discovering her sexuality and wants to masturbate at every inappropriate opportunity.

By this time, it’s clear why ‘Poor Things’ was placed (and won) in the ‘Best Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy’ category at the Golden Globes, because ‘Poor Things’ is incredibly entertaining, bizarre and always wonderfully surprising. the punchlines unexpected and original. And Emma Stone (she also won a Golden Globe) is a wonder. As is known, she has already appeared in “Birdman”, “La La Land” and especially in “The Favorite” (also by Lanthimos), where she competed with Rachel Weisz for the favor of a stubborn, gluttonous and vomiting queen (Olivia Colman ).beaten.

Emma Stone is let loose as Bella Baxter. A fencing storm with black hair down to his waist. But Bella won’t allow anything else. Because Bella is a woman who lacks many of the things society would like to impose on her: boundaries, fear, inhibitions, a sense of shame. Bella is a completely shameless person. When she finds satisfaction in something – sex, food, alcohol, dancing – she stuffs herself with it like a little child.

The plan is for her to marry one of God’s assistants and stay with him on God’s estate forever. Protected, guarded, trapped in a prison of love. She first takes her on a world and sex trip with bon vivant Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo). She is supposed to push off her horns, as young men did before marriage. Of course, this isn’t for a second as easy as Wedderburn imagined, because Bella is a walking nuisance at everything.

The journey takes you from Lisbon to Alexandria to Paris; for Bella it won’t just be an erotic educational journey, because the next thing that hits her like a lightning bolt is the intellect. And on the white paper of their consciousness gradually appears a sharp, all-analyzing mind that knows how to penetrate and manipulate the world as the scalpels of God and his Father do with human and animal bodies. Luckily for us, morality isn’t a factor that really interests Bella.

The 50-year-old Lanthimos is a director who gets his actors to play in a completely different way, as was the case with Olivia Colman in ‘The Favorite’ or with Barry Keoghan, Nicole Kidman and Colin Farrell in ‘The Killing of a Heilig Deer». His stars may be more eccentric and physical than usual, somewhat reminiscent of the tactics of Swiss theater director Christoph Marthaler. And the stars love Lanthimos for it and he loves them too. He calls Emma Stone his official muse, she is like the electricity that brings his creations to life, and she wants to make many more films with him.

‘Poor Things’ is – even more so than ‘The Favorite’ – a completely crazy, bombastic cinematic experience. The images alone are a pure, intoxicating gift, after just a few moments you have completely cleared your visual memory and can take in all the splendor like a amazed child. And in a daze, she follows Bella’s strange journey from a clumsy, put-together organism to an almost flexible character who is always extremely comic in her analytical accuracy. Frankenstein’s monster lives. And it is happy.

‘Poor Things’ runs from January 18. in the cinema.