4/3/2024 0 Comments Bondage gagged gifI 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.
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