![]() This is a film about female pleasure in which the men are like discarded condoms, relics of archaic transactions, more intent on power than pleasure. But I set that aside because of the exuberant commitment Stone brings, not just on screen but in her talking about the picture. And I wondered, as I was surfing on Poor Things, whether there would be fresh objections to a display put on by and for men. I was reminded of Barbarella, another sci-fi comic book rite in which the chronic voyeur Roger Vadim whispered to us: “Can you imagine having Jane Fonda?” Even in 1968, that modestly funny film was smarmy with male-gaze superiority. Some of us find it hard to escape the gene-splicing in that marriage. The discovery of sex and the discovery of film. Poor Things was breathing and that’s how one feels Bella’s arousal and her coming into life. I hadn’t felt such a compulsion since Citizen Kane, in which the black-and-white imagery pulsated with megalomania and its shame. I am thinking of how the movie so conflates production design with the ways lenses can enlarge and compress space. I was thinking the same way, though I was as thrilled by the passion of the film-making and the glee it was producing in the audience. There’s a point in Poor Things where Bella wonders why people don’t do this thing all the time – she means sexual action, the hectic activity that has overtaken this bride of Frankenstein. View image in fullscreen Photograph: Tony Bock/Toronto Star/Getty Images Not a real-world picture, but a thrilling one, albeit one that might be found threatening in some quarters. In Bella, the film offers a vision of a sexually free woman who fearlessly, without guilt, without negative consequences, quenches her appetites, utterly unconscious of Judaeo-Christian or patriarchal shame. Like the story of Medea, though, it brings something rich that is nothing to do with its surface mechanics. You have also never seen a living creature composed of half a goose and half a dog. You have never seen a person like Bella Baxter. Its relationship with realism is pretty heavily signalled from the off – as in, a distant one. It is not a handbook advocating the transplanting of a newborn’s brain into the head of a recently deceased adult woman, nor is it promoting (as some have suggested) paedophilia. Poor Things – an adaptation of the late Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel, itself a version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – is a fable. I might as well think of Medea, the magnificent character of Greek myth who kills her own children, as charting a practical path to power. No, I do not think that I will be basing my feminist manifesto on this film any time soon. To ask the question “Is Poor Things a feminist movie?” strikes me as a category error. View image in fullscreen Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian ‘It is not promoting paedophilia’Ĭharlotte Higgins, Guardian chief culture writer The feting of Poor Things – a heterosexual middle-aged man’s fantasy about nymphomania, with the flimsiest covering of “satire” and a tagged-on message about female genital mutilation being “bad” – merely confirms that feminism still has a long way to go. ![]() The acclaimed French film-maker Céline Sciamma, who made the genuinely erotic drama Portrait of a Lady on Fire, once told me about the battle for female actors, writers and directors to be treated with respect by European cinema’s enduringly sexist male establishment. I know this scene was shortened, thanks to the BBFC’s suggestion that it contravened the 1978 Protection of Children Act, but lord, it still seems to go on for ever. ![]() She is bound and gagged in a scene played for laughs.Ī man forces his young sons to watch him have sex with Bella. Men – always much older and sometimes with visual deformities (raising questions about the degrading treatment of people with disabilities) – use Bella’s body without any attempt at foreplay. Prostitution has always been romanticised by men in fiction, but it remains overwhelmingly the male exploitation of poor female bodies. ![]() Feminists challenge the patriarchal system in which women’s choices exist. Just because a woman chooses to do something, does not make the act feminist. In the 1970s, pornographers jumped on the women’s liberation movement, claiming sexual liberation was essentially never saying no.Īs a work of fiction, Poor Things can explore anything it likes, but it is not feminist. She embarks on a “voyage of self-discovery” which leads, quickly, to an insatiable desire for sex with as many men as possible, one of the oldest abuser myths. Hilarious! But Bella, Stone’s character, has an infant’s brain – and the consent issue for a woman with learning difficulties is a blazing red flag. Emma Stone is a terrific actor, Mark Ruffalo a genuine good guy activist playing a cad.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |