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Can it be a film reduced to your ideology? However, before answering this question, we would have to answer another one: what should we understand by the ideology of an artistic work? That is, and to summarize very briefly: Is it possible to separate ethics from aesthetics? In times of Twitter, in which the judgment takes precedence over the legal basis, the mere fact of asking is probably unnecessary. But it doesn’t just stop at trying things out. The question would ultimately be and with regard to Yorgos Lanthimos’ film candidate for a whopping 11 Oscars: It poor creatures a radical feminist film that focuses on a woman who questions the norms and shame of heteropatriarchal society, or are we, on the contrary, facing the umpteenth iteration of the most rancid male fantasy that reduces the concept of women’s freedom to being a whore? Let everyone choose a side. In fact, the Greek and author of works like Canino y Lobster screwed up again. Happens often.
Not long ago we debated whether “Blonde,” directed by Andrew Dominik and starring Ana de Armas, was a denunciation of how Hollywood had stripped away the most fleshly of its myths (that is, feminist), or whether, on the contrary, it was limited to the showcase become. Degrading and absurd, unedifying positions of the same myth (consequently sexist). Judging by the crowd’s consensus, those who claimed second place won. We lost the first one, which strangely enough included the author of the book herself, Joyce Carol Oates. More recently there is the case of Barbie. For some, an intelligent pop universalization of emancipatory ideology; For others, a completely commercial and very reassuring false denunciation of despotic machoism (in this case there is a third offended reading and closer to incel, but it is more of a dark web problem).
And suddenly, poor creatures.
The first thing that catches your attention about Lanthimos’ proposal is its exuberant visual rift. Between gothic, excessive and tragic, the film gradually expands, deforms and compresses (although not necessarily in this order) the standardized ways of experiencing space and time in the cinema. It subjugates because it is obsessive, because it is blinding, and because it is feverish. Aesthetic choice is, so to speak, inextricably linked to ethics. Anything but just a whim. Based on the novel by Alasdair Gray, the film tells the story of a woman with an adult body (and therefore imbued with desire) who receives the brain of a child (and therefore is consumed by curiosity). We’re talking about a woman who turns the myth of Frankenstein on its head (now the doctor is a great Willem Dafoe) and discovers the world, and it’s been us ever since sex without the imposed barriers of shame, Modesty or, for that matter, the same sex in the deceptive sense (of phallus). And that requires, and this is the film’s big proposal, a new look.
In fact, it is very unfair to leave everything in a rather culturally warlike discussion about gender. Lanthimos goes even further. Lanthimos deals with the way of understanding the world in its entirety and discusses it from its essence. with a narrative, aural (overflowing and brilliant music by Jerskin Fendrix), visual and even tactile proposal that is truly stunning. for original, for coherent, for thoughtful and because yes. When you look at things from a completely new place, everything appears for the first time. And of course the previously invisible contradictions emerge: why poverty, why morality, why dancing (the scene in question is hilarious), why we don’t ask ourselves why more often. And of course sex is one of these reasons.
And then come the curves. Emma Stone gives one of those understated performances. It goes into the same moving, risky and challenging space that Vertigo classics like “tame” by Pedro Almodvar took us. Transgression consists in sensing the possibility of emancipation from the most undesirably vulgar, immoral and even patriarchal position. I declare. Bella Baxter, the name of the main character, is literally kidnapped on her long adventure through the new world by an unscrupulous exploiter (Mark Ruffalo), who turns her, by definition, irrepressible desire into a commodity until she ends up in a brothel, where far from it , being exploited, she is an explorer (and exploiter) of her own pleasure. Could there be a more sexist and reprehensible dream than that of the object woman without rules and reason, i.e. that of the prostitute who is content with her submission?
Lanthimos and Stone herself, who has become a director in her own right, offer the viewer the opportunity to walk right along the edge of a cliff. We are talking about an abyss that accurately recreates the same fantasy that it condemns. And there, in the instability of its proposal, the film grows, disturbing, questioning, hypnotizing and sometimes even irritating. But always out of enthusiasm. Emma Stone is used as an instrument of pleasure for men with the same evidence as She uses the same men as precarious dildos. of his newfound and unquenchable fire. The rules of representation are those that we have given ourselves in the heteropatriarchy that inhabits us but, and this is crucial, have been changed as if it were the scariest fairy tale. Aesthetics, we said, is ethics.
To recover a masterpiece, the kidnapped Victoria forgives Abril and ends up loving her captor Antonio Banderas. And he did it at the moment when the two of them recognized their helplessness, their vulnerability, their victim situation in each other. One would say that, however different the arguments may be, the mechanism is now similar. Bella Baxter finally discovers the abyss that inhabits her by reinventing herself in the abyss society has created. about her status as a woman. And so his deliverance has much of its own condemnation. And everyone’s. Although the desire for freedom prevails, the desire to be what you want to be. Just like that. Bright. Excitingly brilliant.
In fact, Poor Creatures is very close to all of the director’s previous works, always keen to discuss the schemes of reality and even obsessed with looking at the world from an ever-new perspective. This already happened in his first famous work, Canino, where the names changed and with them the rites of passage and the bloody and deadly liturgies of the sacrifice of a sacred deer. poor creatures is the purification and sublimation of all previous filmographies, including of course The favourite.
So intelligently feminist that there is no choice but to argue with her, against her and exaggeratedly in favor of Bella.
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Direction: Yorgos Lanthimos Department: Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef, Christopher Abbott, Jerrod Carmichael, Margaret Qualley, Kathryn Hunter Nationality: Ireland For the: 2023 Duracin: 141 mins
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