I managed to watch two movies, one after another, in parts. As it happened, at the same time, i was trying to help my sister who is having a little bit of a mental breakdown. I see parallels between reel and real life in all three.
Poor Things is a little Alice in Wonderland, a little Wizard of Oz, a little Marquis de Sade and a whole lot of Frankenstein. It also has a lot in common with some of Yorgos Lanthimos' earlier films, like The Favourite and Dogtooth: transgressive sex, sadistic power games and grisly violence.
But if the movie is brutal, it's also extravagantly beautiful, extremely funny and, by the end, strangely touching, even uplifting. This may be Lanthimos' most unhinged movie, but it also has a joyous exuberance that I haven't felt in much of his earlier work.
The story, loosely adapted from a 1992 novel by the Scottish writer Alasdair Gray, follows a most unusual character named Bella Baxter, played by a mesmerizing Emma Stone. When we first meet Bella in 19th-century London, she looks like an adult woman but has the awkward gait, unformed speech and anarchic spirit of a very young child.
As we learn early on, she's the product of a back-from-the-dead mad science experiment, in which she was implanted with the brain of the child she was carrying at the time of her death. Bella, in other words, is both her mother and her daughter — and, in a weird way, neither.
Inevitably, Bella discovers sex, first exploring her own adult body with childlike curiosity, and then having a passionate fling with a rogue named Duncan Wedderburn — a hilariously over-the-top Mark Ruffalo. When they have sex for the first time, the movie, which until now has mostly been filmed in black-and-white, explodes into wild, rapturous color.
Like an especially bawdy riff on Voltaire's Candide, Poor Things becomes the story of Bella's sexual odyssey. Ever since the movie's Venice Film Festival premiere, much of the reaction has focused on its many frenzied sex scenes, in which the bodies of Stone and Ruffalo, among others, are on abundant display. But the movie is after something more than mere titillation; much of the time, it emphasizes the absurdity rather than the ecstasy of sex.
Before long, Bella grows bored — and disillusioned. She learns that men are mostly horrible, and that the world is full of suffering and poverty. Soon, she begins making new friends, reading Emerson and nourishing her mind. At one point, while they're on a European boat cruise, Duncan becomes jealous, accusing Bella of spending too much time with two other travelers, who are having an engrossing intellectual debate. Bella responds, as she often does, by referring to herself in the third person: "These two are fighting and ideas are banging around in Bella's head and heart like lights in a storm."
Some admirers of Poor Things have argued that it's a feminist work, in which Bella's erotic awakening becomes the key to her liberation. The movie's detractors have dismissed it as just a superficially empowering girlboss narrative. I'm hardly the only one to have noticed that it's basically the un-family-friendly version of Barbie, in which a woman's childlike naiveté becomes a surprisingly effective weapon against the patriarchy. I guess that makes Ruffalo's greasy-haired Duncan a Ken, though you might say the same for the men played by Ramy Youssef, Jerrod Carmichael and Christopher Abbott, all of whom try, in their own ways, to manipulate Bella's destiny.
But Bella won't be controlled, and she's much too brilliant a character to be reduced to a symbol or archetype. Stone gives a great, audacious performance; her Bella can be ignorant, selfish, impulsive and cruel, but also fiercely intelligent, witty, thoughtful and kind. Lanthimos has seldom expressed much affection for his characters, but he clearly loves this one to pieces. He's made a movie that, even at its most outlandish, has its heart in the right place, even if its brains are not.
Justin Chang
“Where are you, Grace?”
“I’m right here. You just can’t see me.”
Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love is of the most viscerally stressful and deeply upsetting films I have ever seen; it’s also frequently beautiful, at times wryly funny, and always aching with a palpable, compelling humanity. Based on the 2012 Argentinian novel by Ariana Harwicz (Matate, Amor, or Die, My Love – Ramsay removed the comma), the film stars Jennifer Lawrence (also producing through her own company, Excellent Cadaver) as a new mother, Grace, struggling with postpartum depression; though saying it that matter-of-factly sounds overly pat for how Ramsay approaches her subject matter. This isn’t so much a film about postpartum depression as it is a film told of and through this state of mental distress. I would compare it to what Lars Von Trier did for depression in 2011’s Melancholia – forcing the viewer to experience the mindset and sensations of living with the disorder, rather than merely ‘depicting’ it – except that Die My Love is an even more abrasive and forthrightly avant-garde film than Von Trier’s.
Indeed, despite the presence of two major movie stars (Lawrence and Robert Pattinson, playing Grace’s husband Jackson), Die My Love has much less in common with anything moviegoers will see in a commercial multiplex than it does the experimental films of Stan Brakhage, which feel like an immense influence here. Scenes of the central couple negotiating the intangible space between them across their new home reminded me of Wedlock House; images of and within the forest – and the images and sensations that forest brings out in Grace – recall the sylvan odyssey of Dog Star Man; and one of the film’s most distressing subplots, about a dog neither Grace nor Jackson will take responsibility for, ultimately felt in communion with Sirius Remembered, where Brakhage photographed the decomposition of a deceased pet in his yard over many months. In short, Die My Love feels like something of a stylistic or spiritual descendent to any film where Brakhage weaved his camera through a home, a yard, or the woods, and/or where he turned bodies into spectral dancers on screen. Director of Photography Seamus McGarvey (a great and deeply underrated cinematographer) moves his camera in similar ways, capturing spaces in similarly ethereal, liminal fashion, and allowing light to bounce off his lens in similarly striking, ghostly patterns. And Ramsay directs and blocks her actors much more like interpretive dancers than traditional movie performances. It’s a little like Terrence Malick, but with less twirling; the ‘dances’ here are more visceral, less symbolic, and confrontationally vulnerable.
This is not an “enjoyable” film, except in the sense that it is always enjoyable to watch great artists do great work and push at perceived boundaries. It is a harrowing watch, and one I can’t imagine myself coming back to often. There is nothing even approaching catharsis waiting for viewers at the end, let alone ‘answers.’ And my only nagging worry throughout was that the film might try for that, out of a feeling the audience was owed a ‘neater’ takeaway after two hours of challenge. But Ramsay is smarter and more uncompromising than that. This is a film about subjective experience, and specifically the subjective experience of feeling lost, adrift, angry, and confused, at war with one’s body, mind, and surroundings. Humans can work through all that and come out on the other side intact, of course; but sometimes they don’t. And either way, the story of recovery is a separate one to what is being chronicled here. Ramsay is right to leave us where she does, on the edge of a knife balanced precariously between hope and despair. The film stands as a remarkable testament to cinema’s power of expression: how the camera can take indescribable internal realities and externalize them on a giant screen.
Jonathan Lack
As for my sister, I...
Advised her if she can bring herself to accept his flaws. Advised her to think of the good in her life and not just the bad.
Advised her to think a few steps ahead if indeed she is divorcing him (and not go from frying pan into the fire).
Advised her to understand his poor health situation.
And finally, advised her to take up meditation or other calming therapies.
If she cannot accept her husband's flaws, everytime he does that, she will get upset
If she cannot break her mind out of negativity especially when there is so much positivity around her, she will always be feeling low
If she leaves him now as he is dying, and when he dies soon all alone, the guilt may eat at her for the rest of her life
It is sad. In many ways, her situation is like mother's.... and of women of previous generation where husbands treat their wives as second class.
I wish her well.
