We asked cultural commentators for their verdicts. Warning: contains spoilers. I wanted to enjoy Poor Things. Emma Stone is a terrific actor, Mark Ruffalo a genuine good guy activist playing a cad. As a work of fiction, Poor Things can explore anything it likes, but it is not feminist. Just because a woman chooses to do something, does not make the act feminist. Prostitution has always been romanticised by men in fiction, but it remains overwhelmingly the male exploitation of poor female bodies.
She is bound and gagged in a scene played for laughs. A man forces his young sons to watch him have sex with Bella. No, I do not think that I will be basing my feminist manifesto on this film any time soon. 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. Its relationship with realism is pretty heavily signalled from the off — as in, a distant one.
You have never seen a person like Bella Baxter. You have also never seen a living creature composed of half a goose and half a dog. Like the story of Medea, though, it brings something rich that is nothing to do with its surface mechanics. 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. Not a real-world picture, but a thrilling one, albeit one that might be found threatening in some quarters.
However, unless informed to the contrary, I regard Stone as an artist and a person in her own right, who has chosen to embody Bella in delicious ways of her own devising. That character, by the way, is not just a bodily person but a thinking one a particularly enjoyable scene involves her, a book, and an older woman played by screen legend Hanna Schygulla.
(mh=9H7uzIScdyD_uvES)5.jpg "Woman in Lisbon")
Is Poor Things feminist? The story is too wild and capricious to be captured by such a word, and is all the more magnificent for it. 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. I am thinking of how the movie so conflates production design with the ways lenses can enlarge and compress space.
