As a dark comedy, the Oscar-winning film PoorThings is somewhere between Oppenheimer and Barbie. We don’t say it often, but this extravagant and explicit visual spectacle is a must-see.
The Oscars are not the measure of all things, but bad films are usually not awarded there. The recent Hollywood film awards ceremony was presented as a competition between excellent films Oppenheimer and Barbie, with a known winner in advance. The explosive talk film Oppenheimer ultimately won 7 of the 13 nominations, while Billie Eilish with her song What was I made for? just could avoid that Barbie none of the 7 nominations would translate into a statuette.
Oppenheimer’s 7-1 victory says little about the value of both films, and all the more about the fact that works of art are difficult to compare. Especially when they are so completely different that it becomes a gimmick. The fact that the film about actress Margot Robbie’s escape from her pink make-believe world was released at the same time as the film about actor Cillian Murphy’s entry into the pitch-black atomic age, gave rise to countless memes and online jokes under the hashtag Barbenheimer .
Journey of discovery
Then it is interesting to note that neatly between these two films was another, which received 11 nominations and 4 awards at the Oscars, and in which darkness and cheerfulness, oppression and emancipation, the ‘masculine’ and the ‘feminine’, science and emotion are contained as themes. The clever film Poor Things is based on a reportedly very good book by Alasdair Gray from 1992, which tells a new Frankenstein story.
The director is like the old surgeon who transplants organs and sews ducks and dogs together to create something original
Main character Bella Baxter (the role for which an uninhibited Emma Stone won the Academy Award for Best Actress) is ‘composed’ of the body of an adult woman who threw herself off a bridge, and the brain of the fetus that this woman carried inside her . Her creator, the eccentric surgeon Dr. Godwin Baxter (played by Willem Dafoe) wants to protect the naive ‘adult child’ from the evil outside world. But like Frankenstein’s monster, she escapes his control. Not to turn against humanity, but to embrace humanity. Initially on the arm of an inveterate casanova (Mark Ruffalo, rightly nominated for best supporting actor), Bella travels to several major cities to explore the world, beauty, reason, love, art, and her sexuality. Until she is no longer a man’s creation or conquest, but – just like Barbie – her freedom of action, and – just like Oppenheimer – learns the limitations of human freedom.
Just not really
Because how exuberant, emancipatory and feminist Poor Things Injustice, inequality and powerlessness are also very explicitly present in the film. It is also formal Poor Things a hybrid case. The stunning sets combine the meticulous realism of Oppenheimer with the emphatic make-believe world of Barbie. The Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos (known for eccentric films such as The Lobster and The Favorite) deliberately shows how he plays with the digital bag of tricks. What you see is beautiful, but it is a not-quite-London, a not-quite-Lisbon, a not-quite-real ship and a not-quite-real starry sky. The director is like the old surgeon who transplants organs and sews ducks and dogs together to create something original. His character Bella is at the same time daughter and mother, child and adult, subject and object, educator and educated, human and machine, creature and creator, a free person and a prisoner. So a not-quite-real-person. The result of experiment, trial and error, of autonomous action and of everything that transcends it. Like Oppenheimerlike Barbie but a little at a time.
Poor Things
SUN – MAY 19 – 8pm
Alsemberg, CC de Meent, 02 359 16 00
TUE – MAY 21 – 8:30 PM
Dilbeek, CC Westrand, 02 466 20 30
MON – MAY 27 – 8:30 PM
Vilvoorde, CC Het Bolwerk, 02 255 46 90
TUE – MAY 28 – 8:30 PM
Grimbergen, CC Strombeek, 02 263 03 43
