Poor Things is a Poor Thing

There will be spoilers

I watched the film Poor Things at the weekend. I like Emma Stone and lots of people I know really loved the film. I had been told that it was fierce and feminist, which I approve of. I mainly gave it a bash because it was on Disney Plus and I could watch it languishing on the sofa in my pyjamas though, if I’m honest.

Poor Things is by the director Yorgos Lanthimos, who made a big splash with The Favourite in 2018. When I saw The Favourite, I didn’t love it. Of course, the acting was flawless. Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone are a triumvirate of goddesses and could make an advert for laxatives sexy and award winning. What I didn’t love was the fact that it reminded me viscerally and repeatedly of Peter Greenaway’s, The Draughtsman’s Contract. Everyone was raving about what a genius Yorgos Lanthimos is and how innovative his films are and all I could think was: ‘Peter Greenaway did this in 1982.’ I felt like a kid who had been invited to a party where everyone was having a marvellous time and I was going around scowling, popping balloons with a pin and generally lowering the mood. I got my coat.

I had higher hopes for Poor Things. For me, they were not realised. Again, this is no slight on the cast, who were all brilliant. Emma Stone fully deserved her Oscar and rounds of applause and a bunchoflars to all the actors. This time I was not reminded of Peter Greenaway. Instead, as I watched the steampunk, pastel hued surreal sets swing by I thought a lot about Jean-Pierre Jeunet and a little bit about Wes Anderson and found myself irritated that Lanthimos is being huzzahed and hurrahed for being a bit of a genius. I don’t buy it.

What really frustrated me about the film though was the message. WHY WHY WHY I thought to myself about every ten minutes, does a woman have to find out who she really is by taking all her clothes off and having sex fifty-seven ways from Sunday? I am so bloody tired of the trope of women emancipating themselves through the power of rampant shagging. Why can’t they empower themselves by finding out they love being a bus conductor or a stamp collector?

There will no doubt be people who say to me: ‘But Katy, this is a deliberate critique of the male gaze. Of course a man would only reanimate a woman to shag her and of course it is brilliant that a woman beats men at their own game.’ All of that is true, and yet it felt like spurious, exhausting bullshit when I watched Stone getting her nipples out more in one film than I have got mine out in an entire fifty two years on the planet and I’ve had three kids who treated my boobs like comfort blankets.

When Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, which this is the inversion of, she was eighteen years old. Her book explores not just the human desire to play God, but the complexities of the nature versus nurture debate. It looks at what it means to be a parent, what it means to be a human being and what it does to human beings when they are forced to grow up without love or care or acceptance. It is moving and brilliant. It is angry and damning and it has that spark of genius that means that the questions it asks are ones that are as relevant today as they were when she wrote it. Her monster is thrillingly tender and achingly vulnerable. He is damaged and damages because he is lost and frightened, a small child forced to deal with adult cruelty, trapped in the body of a monster. He is genuinely scary because he reflects human cruelty back to its source and shows us what we are all capable of. The book asks and does not answer comfortably, who is the real monster here? It’s a slight book that is staggering in its power and the ideas it provokes. All of this came out of the head of a teenage girl. It’s an astonishing tour de force.

I’ve never read the book Poor Things, so I have no idea how true the film is in relation to the book, but what I watched playing out over the duration of the film seemed like a pastiche of fierce, feminist power. It felt like the time I listened to a woman being interviewed about what it was really like for her in the Swinging Sixties during the age of permissiveness. She said that at the time she thought she was being liberated by sleeping with lots of men, but actually, she had less control over her body then, because every man felt it was their right to use it. She said that if she didn’t acquiesce to their demands she was accused of being a prude. It turned out that women being sexually liberated was terrific for men and not so terrific for her. She said she was still on her own if things went wrong, and she still ended up doing the cooking, the cleaning and the washing up. She said that in retrospect it felt like a con trick. That’s what watching this film felt like to me.

It’s not that I don’t think that women should enjoy their bodies, or having sex, or getting their nipples out in public if that’s what they want to do. I think women should have complete agency over their bodies but it should be part and parcel of an entire package that involves their mind and thoughts as well as their physical pleasure. The best part of the film for me was when Bella made friends with an old woman who taught her the power held in books and what it meant to start thinking for herself. Sadly, it was such a small part of what was an endless parade of erotic titivation, which seemed to me to be entirely about the male gaze, that it just got lost in the mix as the nipple count mounted up.

I totally understood that the film used Bella’s growth and understanding of her physical body as a metaphor for her mastery of the rest of her life and the power she had over the people in it. Finding out she actually wanted to be a surgeon like her dad after all hardly seems like something a person would need to find out through such a detailed and complicated montage of fucking as we are treated to when she works in a Parisian brothel for far too long. I get that we are supposed to understand that Bella is learning to bring humanity to proceedings, but suggesting that men might want to take a bath and make conversation with the women they’re paying to slam up against a wall is hardly going to get Kate Millett revved up about innovatory sexual politics.

What made it a fantasy, more than any of the weird modes of transportation, pastel backdrops and jump cuts was that Bella was allowed to get away with her behaviour. As Duncan Wedderburn trapped her in a cabin trunk and then stalked her as she cavorted round Europe with no pants on I thought: ‘if this was real, he’d have killed her by now and everyone would blame her for running off with him in the first place.’ When the ‘God’ who created her admitted that he had thought about fucking her but his parental feeling got in the way, I thought: ‘In real life, he wouldn’t have let that stop him.’ When her sadistic husband turned up and took her away, I thought: ‘In real life, he’d have killed her as soon as the front door swung shut.’

The last twenty minutes of the film attempts to cast a retrospectively girl power vibe over the previous two hours of what was really beautifully shot, sado-masochistic soft porn that will, as ever, mean that any woman who stands up and says: ‘This is bullshit,’ looks like a sour faced, joyless harridan. I am that harridan.