Monthly Archives: January 2024

  • Poor Things

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Yorgos Lanthimos (2023)

    This is Yorgos Lanthimos’s eighth feature but his first to be adapted from another source:  Poor Things is based on Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel of the same name.  The film takes place chiefly in the capacious house of Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), an eccentric and notorious scientist-surgeon-inventor in late Victorian Britain.  His carriage is horse power of a singular kind – an equine head attached to a steam engine.  The Baxter ménage/menagerie includes a housekeeper, Mrs Prim (Vicky Pepperdine); assorted cadavers and mutant animals (like a duck with a French bulldog’s head); and Bella (Emma Stone), Godwin’s ward and his scientific pride and joy.  As he explains to Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), an admiring medical student who becomes his assistant and joins the household, Godwin constructed Bella from the corpse of a pregnant woman who had drowned herself, replacing her brain with that of her still-living foetus.  Bella has pale skin, long black hair, the mind and social skills of a toddler.  Her language is primitive; if she doesn’t like the taste of her food, she spits it out.  Max falls in love with her nevertheless; Bella’s vocabulary improves enough for her to consent to be his wife; Godwin engages a lawyer to draw up a marriage contract.  The lawyer, Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), is a randy rotter with designs on Bella, whose own sensual appetite advances at least as quickly as her intelligence.  On her insistence and with Godwin’s reluctant agreement, she embarks with Duncan on travels that take them on a (late-in-the-day) Grand Tour and, for Bella, a voyage of hedonistic discovery.

    There’s never a visually dull moment in Poor Things – part of what makes it such an ordeal:  142 minutes of unrelenting bravado are a long time.  Lanthimos’s signature is on the film from the very start.  He ensures that the opening titles are nearly impossible to read (and, for that matter, the closing credits).  He’s eager to show off extraordinary set designs (Shona Heath, James Price) and costumes (Holly Waddington), often through the distorting perspective of a fish-eye lens.  In those respects, and in others, Poor Things picks up where Lanthimos’s previous picture, The Favourite (2018), left off.  Robbie Ryan is back as cinematographer.  Tony McNamara, who co-wrote The Favourite with Deborah Davis, has sole screenplay credit this time; the script again shows a penchant for smart-aleck anachronism and four-letter words.  The sustained explicit carnality of Poor Things – in particular, Bella’s sexual treatment by men – should make this new film more challenging to audiences than The Favourite but that doesn’t seem to be the case, at least for plenty of the critics in the audience.  As The Favourite was ‘gloriously nasty’ and ‘wonderfully filthy’, so Poor Things is ‘bonkers’:  take your pick with the adverb – ‘beguilingly’, ‘deliriously’ and ‘utterly’ are quite popular.  All you need do is embrace the bonkersness.  Then you can ignore what might be thought objectionable features of the film – breezy misanthropy, repellent physical detail (it’s big on blood and guts, as well as facial and bodily deformity and ugliness) – and perhaps share in its self-satisfaction.

    Once Bella and Duncan go abroad, the cinematography switches from black-and-white to colour.  (An odd coincidence that three of 2023’s high-profile pictures, vastly different as they are, alternate in this way – Oppenheimer and Maestro, as well as Poor Things.)  The switch reflects the opening up of Bella’s world – geographically, socially, erotically.  The broadening of those latter horizons, in a Lisbon hotel and later on board a cruise ship, is problematic.  Bella is up for whatever Duncan wants sexually.  Because she enjoys it and he’s portrayed as an increasingly ridiculous rake, it seems meant not to matter that Duncan is exploiting a woman with a fully developed body but, for the time being at least, the understanding of a child.  In conversations with others, Bella embarrasses Duncan not only with her unconventional table manners but also by blithely reporting what he’s like in bed and wanting to know about the sexual habits of fellow ship passengers, an elderly mittel-European dowager (Hanna Schygulla) and her much younger male escort (Jerrold Carmichael).  The heroine rattles on like a lewd version of Eliza Dolittle when Henry Higgins first unleashes her in public; but those on the receiving end of Bella are remarkably incurious about her, despite her outlandish appearance and manner of speech.  You don’t get the sense that this is because they’re too polite to ask or that Lanthimos and Tony McNamara are making a point about contemporary attitudes towards women – rather, that such questions would be inconvenient to the film-makers.  (Hanna Schygulla’s too good an actress not to react at all but the dowager is no more than quizzically charmed by Bella’s candour.)  The only unsettling remark aimed at Bella comes from a woman in a Lisbon restaurant who claims to recognise her as ‘Victoria Blessington’.  Bella doesn’t know what the woman’s talking about but we can guess.

    By the time the ship stops at Alexandria, Bella’s intellectual powers and moral compass have advanced apace (although she never becomes physically self-conscious:  I didn’t get that).  Duncan, no longer able to control her, spends much of his time drinking and gambling, and wins a packet at the roulette table.  Distressed by the abject poverty she sees in Alexandria, Bella passes his winnings to two crew members for them to hand on to the local poor.  (The men pocket the money themselves, of course.)  No longer able to pay their way, Duncan and Bella are ejected from the ship at Marseille and make their way to Paris.  There, Bella decides to earn money by working in a brothel – the last straw for Duncan, who has some kind of breakdown.  Lanthimos’s approach to the material throughout is epitomised by how he handles Bella’s experiences in Egypt vs Paris.  When she contemplates the sick and starving of Alexandria, they’re glimpsed in a long shot, not distinguishable as individuals.  When she turns prostitute, there are repeated in-your-face sessions between her and clients.  At one point, Bella, lined up with her colleagues for selection by a male customer of hideous aspect, asks the brothel-keeper Madame Swiney (Kathryn Hunter) if it wouldn’t make more sense for the female sex workers to make their choice of man.  Lanthimos uses this single line of uncompromising feminist logic as a sop to justify all the voyeuristic boudoir longueurs.  Kathryn Hunter’s disturbing eccentricity prevents the brothel scenes from being a complete write-off but there’s only one sexual encounter with any real wit.  A French father (a cameo from Damien Bonnard) is accompanied on his visit to Bella by his two pre-adolescent sons – he wants to show them the ropes.  There’s a comical contrast between the father’s pompous self-assurance on arrival and his difficulties once he’s in bed with Bella.  His rather bemused sons dutifully observe and take notes.

    The brothel episode doesn’t feature in Alasdair Gray’s source novel.  Since I’ve not read this, it would be unfair to use it as a stick to beat the film with but one difference (according to the Wikipedia synopsis of the book) seems crucial and deserves attention.  Gray’s story is obviously Frankenstein-inspired:  Bella is the female ‘Monster’; she addresses her Promethean creator (whose forename is the same as Mary Shelley’s maiden name) as ‘God’.  While translating these elements into screen drama is straightforward enough, Gray’s complex narrative structure is another matter.  Most of the narration is by Bella’s husband, Archibald McCandless [sic], and contained in his autobiography ‘Episodes from the Early Life of a Scottish Public Health Officer’.  (The novel’s setting is Gray’s native heath of Glasgow; the British parts of the film are apparently taking place in England though not in a specific city.)  However, McCandless’s account is followed by one from his wife in which she suggests ‘that her “poor fool” of a husband has concocted a life for her from the prevailing gothic and romantic motifs of the period …’  These ‘fictitious historical documents are prefaced with an introduction by one Alasdair Gray, who presents himself as the editor of the following text …’

    Lanthimos and McNamara can’t be expected to replicate all this in the screenplay but they do need to give Bella not only (like Mrs McCandless) an educated voice but also, in deference to 2020s zeitgeist, a happy – that is, a self-realising and self-assertive – ending.  In the course of her travels, Bella gets to be very well read – in philosophy, literature and politics.  After learning from Max McCandles that Godwin is terminally ill, she returns home, makes peace with ‘God’ and goes through with her earlier plan to wed Max.  The marriage ceremony is interrupted by Duncan and a man who announces himself as Bella’s husband – or, at least, as the widower of Bella’s previous incarnation, Victoria Blessington.  Anxious to know more about her life as Victoria, Bella leaves Max at the altar and returns home with Alfred Blessington (Christopher Abbott), a soldier of empire who wastes no time in revealing the sadistic nature that caused his wife, pregnant with his child, to end her life.  After threatening his manservant at gunpoint, Blessington does the same to Bella, demanding that she undergo genital mutilation and drink a chloroform-laced cocktail to knock her out for the procedure.  She throws the cocktail in his face; he literally shoots himself in the foot.

    Playing Bella Baxter demands considerable technical skill and nerve on the part of the actress concerned:  Bella’s journey to irrepressible ‘freedom’ requires physical fearlessness and versatility, as well as progressive vocal transformation.  Emma Stone (who also produced the film, with Lanthimos and others) is especially impressive in the early scenes with her staccato, guttural outbursts and toddling gait – a wild-child Morticia Addams.  Although her sex scenes are inevitably causing more comment than anything else, Stone is very good in demonstrating other facets of Bella’s appetite – stuffing her face with pastéis de nata, manically jerking about when she takes to a dance floor.  The performance never ceases to be a feat but I struggled to take pleasure in watching it.  There’s a moment in Lisbon when she hears a fado being hauntingly sung (by Carminho, a well known Portuguese fado) and a suggestion of sadness crosses Bella’s face.  It’s one of Emma Stone’s few gently expressive moments; for the most part, it’s just as well that Bella is only approximately human.  One of the few interesting things about Poor Things was seeing it, by coincidence, just three days after I’d renewed the acquaintance, forty-odd years on, of Richard Brooks’s Looking for Mr Goodbar (1977).  The two films share a sexually adventurous female protagonist, though Brooks disapproves of Theresa Dunn’s behaviour while Lanthimos ‘celebrates’ Bella Baxter’s.  Also as in Looking for Mr Goodbar, the performances of the main men in Poor Things aren’t up to much.

    Given how often British actors are cast as Americans, it may be churlish to complain about the reverse in action but it hasn’t done Willem Dafoe, Mark Ruffalo or Christopher Abbott any favours here.  Ruffalo has shown himself a fine naturalistic actor playing American working men of his own (or nearly his own) generation in films such as Zodiac (2007), The Kids Are All Right (2010), Margaret (2011), Foxcatcher (2014) and Spotlight (2015).  What he does in Poor Things is liable to be overpraised simply because he’s miscast and such evident effort goes into his exaggerated posh English accent and matching mannerisms, which are painful to hear and see.  Even allowing that Max is innocuous, Ramy Youssef brings little colour to the role.  Abbott is very weak as Bella/Victoria’s toxic first husband and Jerrold Carmichael wooden as Hanna Schygulla’s shipboard companion.  Willem Dafoe does better, despite giving his scientist character an accent that’s an evolving experiment in itself.  Is it meant to be Scottish (and so just about the film’s only nod to its Caledonian origins)?  The accent is roughly consistent with Godwin’s stitched-together face (the handiwork of his own father, also a surgeon) but the pieces of that fit together more neatly than their vocal counterparts.  Even if the dodgy accent is intentional, it belongs in a comedy sketch rather than a film of nearly two and a half hours.  Still, Dafoe does leaven the scientist-playing-God with a compassion for Bella that, in the heartless context of Poor Things, is distinctive and almost mysterious.

    Godwin dies peacefully.  Bella decides to carry on his scientific and surgical work with Max at her side.  The closing scene is a group portrait in the garden of Godwin’s house, now (presumably) Bella’s.  She smilingly presides over a gathering that includes, as well as Max and Mrs Prim, two other young women – Felicity (Margaret Qualley) and Toinette (Suzy Bemba).  Felicity was Godwin’s next experiment after Bella; regretting what he saw as the latter’s precocious independence, he was more comfortable with Felicity’s slow rate of development but she’s starting to blossom now.  Toinette befriended Bella when they were both sex workers in Paris and introduced her to lesbianism and socialism.  (The extent to which Bella is persisting with either isn’t very clear.)  Alfred Blessington is on all fours, eating grass from the lawn.  His brain has been swapped with that of a goat.  For viewers who like Poor Things but need a shot of political correctness to complement their immersion in its OMG phantasmagoria, the girl-power finale is probably just the job.  This viewer found it perfunctory and shallow; since I’d been furiously bored for more than two hours, though, I’m not complaining that Yorgos Lanthimos rushes to wrap up his interminable tale.

    16 January 2024

  • Looking for Mr Goodbar

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Richard Brooks (1977)

    Looking for Mr Goodbar is part of this month’s BFI programme commemorating the Scala cinema in King’s Cross and helping to promote a new documentary about it.  Jane Giles, a programmer at the Scala for the last ten years of its life as a film house (1983-93), curator of the BFI season and co-director with Ali Catterall of the documentary, introduced this screening of Richard Brooks’s bleak drama.  Giles began by asking a full house in NFT2 for a show of hands on four questions.  Who had seen the new documentary?  Or had ever seen a film at the Scala?  (Plenty of hands went up, roughly equal numbers both times.)  Or had seen Looking for Mr Goodbar previously?  (Fewer hands.)  In answer to the last question – who saw Looking for Mr Goodbar at the Scala? – only two hands went up.  Jane Giles seemed impressed there were as many as that because, she explained, there’d only ever been two Scala screenings of Brooks’s film (one in July 1984, the other July 1985).  Giles also acknowledged that it wasn’t typical Scala fare.  The full title of her documentary is Scala!!! Or, the Incredibly Strange Rise and Fall of the World’s Wildest Cinema and How It Influenced a Mixed-up Generation of Weirdos and Misfits.  The place made its name showing, as well as various cult curiosities, sexploitation, horror, kung fu and (what’s now termed) LGBTQIA+ cinema.  That Looking for Mr Goodbar came to be screened at the Scala at all is a clue to its split personality.  The film is politically reactionary but sexually explicit.  It’s misogynistic yet foregrounds female sexual appetite and behaviour – as the storyline dictates – to a degree very unusual in a mainstream Hollywood picture of the time.

    Brooks’s screenplay is an adaptation of Judith Rossner’s 1975 best-seller of the same name.  Rossner’s novel was inspired by a real-life crime – the murder, at the start of 1973, of a twenty-eight-year-old primary school teacher called Roseann Quinn.  Since 1969, Quinn – a native New Yorker, raised a Catholic – had taught in a Bronx school for deaf children.  In her private life, she developed the habit of meeting men in local singles bars and taking them back to her studio apartment in West 72nd Street.  She was stabbed to death there apparently by one such pick-up (John Wayne Wilson committed suicide in jail while awaiting trial for Quinn’s murder).  As a young teenager, Roseann Quinn spent a year in hospital after a back operation for scoliosis, which left her with a slight limp.  In Judith Rossner’s novel, the sex drive of Theresa Dunn, Quinn’s fictional alter ego, is portrayed as psychologically aberrant because sex is all that she wants from a man – sex unaccompanied by love.  Rossner makes use of Roseann Quinn’s medical history to elaborate Theresa’s abnormality.  As a young child, she had polio; her parents were too preoccupied with Theresa’s siblings to notice, until the damage was done, that muscle weakness resulting from polio was causing her spine to curve.  The scoliosis surgery has left Theresa with, as well as a limp, a scar on her back that’s virtually the mark of Cain.  Theresa’s first adult relationship is with her college professor, Martin Engle.  She’s emotionally committed to, as well as sexually excited by, him but Professor Engle, a married man, doesn’t reciprocate that commitment.  Insufficiently loved as a child and used by her first lover, Theresa not only gives up post-Engle on the idea of receiving love but is also incapable of showing it – except, in a highly circumscribed form, to the deaf kids to whom she devotes her working hours.

    Whereas Rossner slightly backdates her protagonist’s murder to the first day of the 1970s, Richard Brooks moves the Roseann Quinn timeframe forward:  the movie’s Theresa Dunn dies in the early hours of New Year’s Day 1977. This time adjustment, though not large, is significant.  Although Rossner’s story feels like a cautionary tale, Theresa, as a case-cum-character-study, is individual enough; she doesn’t come across chiefly as representative of a generation or social type.  If that’s also true of the film it’s only to the extent that the actress playing Theresa – Diane Keaton – had very recently emerged as a highly individual screen presence:  Woody Allen’s Annie Hall was released in April 1977, just six months before Goodbar opened in American cinemas.  Brooks’s script and direction, however, present Theresa – emphatically – as a casualty of the permissive society and second-wave feminism.  The repeated shots of seedy New York streets at night – neon signs advertising sex shows and porn movies – might seem to echo Taxi Driver (1976) but the cityscape’s infernal quality in Martin Scorsese’s film is seen from, and exaggerated by, Travis Bickle’s disturbed perspective.  In Looking for Mr Goodbar, New York’s nocturnal possibilities are a magnet to Theresa Dunn and the abandon-all-hope point of view is the director’s.  When Brooks inserts a television news report of an anniversary celebration of the women’s liberation movement, the male reporter’s tone of voice is sarcastic and disparaging.  Theresa goes to a party – hosted by her sister Katherine (Tuesday Weld) and Katherine’s latest man – which starts with a screening of blue movies and culminates in drug-fuelled group sex.  Brooks makes his anti-heroine’s spinal condition hereditary:  she feels she can’t risk motherhood and asks a doctor to sterilise her.  That change to her condition in the novel might seem to dilute the film’s anti-permissive stance – you’d expect Brooks to show Theresa having sex followed by an abortion.  He doesn’t quite forego the opportunity, though:  airline hostess Katherine (who, unlike her sister, romanticises each one of her short-lived Mr Rights) terminates a pregnancy.

    The only one of Jane Giles’s questions that my hand went up for was the third – I saw Looking for Mr Goodbar on its original British release, in early 1978.  The film’s clashing elements, evident enough then, are all the more conspicuous now.  With 2020s vision, Brooks’s disapproving but persisting description of Theresa’s sex life seems more than ever like having it both ways, censuring and titillating at the same time.  The picture, while condemning sexual licence, exploits the permissiveness of New Hollywood:  there’s plenty of bare flesh in evidence, female and male.  (Goodbar fared well at the box office.)  It’s also more striking in long retrospect that a movie from a major studio (Paramount) was apparently denouncing feminism so soon after women’s lib had entered the cultural mainstream.  The protagonist’s harshest critic in the film is her blue-collar father (Richard Kiley).  A choleric loudhailer whenever he addresses Theresa, he’s blind to the promiscuity of Katherine, his favoured daughter, as well as maudlin and determinedly wrong-headed about his own family pedigree.  Mr Dunn is such a ridiculous pain in the neck that he’s wholly ineffective as a spokesman for decent traditional values, so deluded that he’s a feeble representative of patriarchy.  Looking for Mr Goodbar has aged typically in visual terms for a Hollywood product of its era.  William Fraker’s cinematography was Oscar-nominated in 1978; except for the external nighttime sequences, the film’s palette has decayed into the pink-and-ginger colour scheme of plenty of its contemporaries.

    You get used to that but the film is hard to watch both because it’s grim and because it’s bad.  Jane Giles in her introduction quoted Pauline Kael’s dismissal of Goodbar as ‘a windy jeremiad about our permissive society on top of fractured film syntax’ and it is a dog’s breakfast.  A few examples … The narrative occasionally switches into what’s soon revealed to be Theresa’s fantasy or nightmare.  These sequences have no impact:  her actual life is painted so garishly that her imagination is tamer than reality.  When she first meets Tony (Richard Gere), who proves to be her most aggressively persistent sex partner, she’s in a bar with a drink and a hard-copy edition of The Godfather.  Italian-American Tony comments on the book, says he’s seen the movie, mentions Al Pacino:  if Tony doesn’t realise he’s talking to a woman incarnated by the actress who played Pacino’s wife in The Godfather films, Goodbar audiences certainly did and do.  This encounter got a deserved laugh in NFT2 although that’s surely not what Brooks intended.  It’s true The Godfather features in Judith Rossner’s novel but Mario Puzo’s mega-seller had only recently been published according to Rossner’s timeframe; by 1976, when Theresa and Tony meet, it had become a much larger cultural phenomenon.  The retention of Puzo’s book seems to present it – bizarrely – as an emblem of the societal malaise that Brooks is critiquing.  Why didn’t he take advantage of his own adjustment of the timeframe to have Theresa reading fiction more apposite to his agenda – something like Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (first published in 1973)?  Numerous classroom scenes illustrate what a dedicated, effective teacher Theresa is:  it’s hard to know if these are meant to give an extra tragic dimension to (what Brooks sees as) her fatal flaw or make us wonder what else she needs if her working life is so fulfilling, or what.  After she and Tony have snorted cocaine, he gives Theresa a Quaalude to bring her down, she sleeps in next morning and arrives late for school.  When she arrives, her class of eight year olds – as a disapproving colleague reveals to Theresa – is running riot.  The colleague’s action in letting them run riot seems no less reprehensible than Theresa’s sleep-in.

    When Theresa apologises to the kids, some of them are disapproving too; in expressing their disapproval, they start to overact – a tendency epidemic in the film’s adult cast.  It afflicts all the main men in Theresa’s life:  Alan Feinstein as Professor Engle; Richard Gere, who’s uncharacteristically hyperactive as Tony; William Atherton as James, the sexually inhibited social worker who tries and fails to make a good woman of Theresa; Tom Berenger, as Gary, who eventually murders her.  Gary lives with his older gay boyfriend, who has persuaded him to drag up for New Year’s Eve; nearly all his female garb disappears in a street scuffle.  Furiously ashamed and upset, Gary puts his own clothes back on, dumps his lover and goes to the bar where he meets Theresa.  When they go back to her apartment, he tells her he has a pregnant wife in Florida but they go to bed anyway; when Gary can’t get an erection and Theresa tells him it doesn’t matter, he decides she’s impugning his manhood, rapes her then stabs her to death.  The attack is shown in strobe lighting – the strobe was a Christmas present to Theresa from James.  What seemed a puzzling choice of gift at the time is now explained:  it comes in handy for Richard Brooks’s big finish.  I had to look away during this, of course (there’s another difference between 1978 and 2024) – as I also sometimes did watching Richard Kiley.  That was a pointless exercise since I couldn’t avert my ears as well as my eyes.  In a keen contest, Kiley’s performance as Theresa’s father is the worst of the lot.

    The main actresses fare better.  Another of the film’s retrospective points of interest is watching Diane Keaton in what proved to be such an untypical role.  Keaton supplies the only human interest in the gruesome saga and, using her great comedy instincts, water-in-the-desert moments of humour.  Yet her aforementioned individuality, although it makes Looking for Mr Goodbar easier to sit through, also gets in the way; it feels increasingly wrong for a character whose fate is predetermined.  Katherine isn’t much of a role but Tuesday Weld (who received the film’s only other Oscar nomination, for Supporting Actress) is empathic and animated.  The sisters’ mother is even less of a role and Priscilla Pointer can’t do anything with it.  (In 1976-77 Pointer cornered the market in parents whose main job is to watch on aghast:  she was Amy Irving’s mother in Brian de Palma’s Carrie.)  What else to recommend?  There’s a good selection of contemporary pop on the soundtrack, including Thelma Houston’s ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’; this is supported by Artie Kane’s original score, whose muted melancholy has a more forgiving tone than Richard Brooks’s direction.  The film’s intrinsic merits are, frankly, few – but Looking for Mr Goodbar fascinates now as a 1970s Hollywood artefact.

    13 January 2024

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