Let’s go back briefly to “Frankenstein” (1931) by James Whale. While the Faustian doctor is collecting all the pieces necessary to complete his creation, he asks his servant Fritz the important task of stealing a brain from the university. When the henchman sneaks into the institution, he makes the mistake of not taking a healthy brain, but one that belonged to the body of a criminal. In Whale’s adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel, the psyche is a certainty while the body becomes a mystery to the viewer (we know how the monster will behave, but not what its unimaginable appearance will be). However, it was predictable that an adaptation of Frankenstein imagined by Yorgos Lanthimos would not go through the original novel, but through “Poor creatures” by Alasdair Gray, a work in which the body is reborn simply to once again understand the peculiarities of the psyche, an indisputable leitmotiv of the director’s filmography.
On paper, the Greek filmmaker’s latest is a deliriously unworkable film. “Pobre Creatures” is an excessive comedy in every sense, a rock opera without rock whose pomposity invades every artistic section of the proposal. Robbie Ryan’s photography hyperbolizes the already hyperbolized use of wide angles in “The favourite”, touching in some frames an impressionist dimension more typical of graphic novels than cinema. The music of newcomer Jerskin Fendrix perfectly encapsulates that automaton and circus soul of Lanthimos’ cyber-Victorian universe in a soundtrack located between the dreamlike and the artificial. The director opts for an increasingly corporal comedy displayed through a monumental Emma Stone, willing to give every part of her body to the cause. The actress, along with a fascinatingly shameless Mark Ruffalo, give this sexual screwball proposal the achievement of being one of the most atypical comedies of recent years.
But beyond its excessive surface, “Poor creatures” proposes a translation into fantasy of all the thematic concerns that have always hovered over Lanthimos’ work. Both the semiotic experiments on language and confinement in “Canino” and the dilemmas about carnality behind the social codes of “The favourite” They have their reminiscences in this adaptation. Always following in the footsteps of the modern Prometheus, Lanthimos portrays the unusualness of re-understanding the world through re-understanding how the body relates to it. In this kind of immobile “Boyhood”, the maturity of the protagonist is not materialized in her bodily evolution but rather in her ideological one.
“Poor creatures” It thus becomes a (re)discovery of the horrors of capitalism, monogamy and patriarchy through an Emma Stone in constant learning. The gradual maturity of the infantilized Bella Baxter causes the infantilization of the hypothetically mature men who make up her social ecosystem. Lanthimos breaks with the romanticism of “Frankenstein” by James Whale, because now being able to create life does not exalt man, but quite the opposite. Exploring humanism from pathos is once again the best weapon of the Greek filmmaker, even though sometimes issues are approached too tiptoe. One could come to think that the visual device seems to distance us from Lanthimos’ sociological nature – I disagree with those who believe that this is his most accessible film – or at least that it exempts him from justifying himself with a little more enthusiasm. But it is undeniable that Yorgos already moves through the Hollywood cabaret like Pedro through his house, prioritizing crazy entertainment over any victory of the philosophical aura.