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One of the most anticipated films of the year finally arrives in theaters: after winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, “Poor Creatures!” by Yorgos Lanthimos is the absolute protagonist of the week at the cinema.
At the center of this largely surreal story is Bella Baxter, a young woman brought back to life by Dr. Godwin Baxter, a brilliant and unorthodox scientist. The girl lives under the protection of her “savior”, but she is eager to learn and experience the world. Attracted by the worldliness that she misses, she runs away with Duncan Wedderburn, a shrewd and dissolute lawyer, in a whirlwind adventure that touches several nations. Free from the prejudices of her time, Bella grows firm in her resolve to fight to improve the world around her.
Taking inspiration from the 1992 novel of the same name by Alasdair Gray, Lanthimos has created a film which, while following the source text, fully displays his personal touch, both in terms of formal choices and various content ideas. Five years later “The Favourite”, the Greek director signs another film starring an extraordinary Emma Stone, telling a path of female emancipation of great strength and perfectly suited to the times in which we are living. If at the beginning the plot explicitly recalls the Victorian atmospheres and the novel “Frankenstein”, as Bella continues her journey, more and more connections with the present and ideas capable of making us reflect develop.
“Poor creatures!” and the other films of the week
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Continuous register changes
Lanthimos, who turned fifty last May, uses his typical visual choices, capable of distorting the viewer’s gaze, through orderly camera movements and photography full of light changes (only the first chapter is in white and black) and colors. In the same way, the changes in genre and register are constant, giving life to a kaleidoscopic and stratified vision, albeit the victim of some clever passages and undoubtedly designed to advance the theses that interest the author. Despite a certain rough construction , the film has a considerable visual and dramaturgical power, thanks also to a screenplay (written by Tony McNamara, already author of the script of “The Favourite”), full of passages that refer to other films by Lanthimos, starting from that sense of imprisonment that could be felt in “Dogtooth”, a 2009 film and still today one of the director’s most important.
It grows at the distance “Poor creatures!”, ending up being enjoyable and fun in several sequences. The character of Bella Baxter is one of the most interesting in cinema in recent times and will remain in the memory of spectators for a long time. Title definitely appreciated also by the Academy which reserved 11 nominations for it, including those for best film and best director.