If you haven't seen the new Yórgos Lánthimos (Canine, The Lobster, Killing the sacred deer...Run away! This review will contain several spoilers, and although the film looks less for its screenplay twists than for its unique atmosphere, the sideration felt in the face of Poor creatures will only be greater in the mind of a spectator blank of all information... And for others, good reading!
Doctor Maboul
A famous (and unorthodox) doctor, Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), a pregnant young woman (Emma Stone) just after his suicide. If he succeeds in bringing her back to life, he will not forbid some anatomical faceties: he will remove the brain from the newborn to put him in his mother's skull box. Trouble operation on a woman/width forgetting everything about her past, now stuck in a body unsuitable for her mental age. Renowned Bella, she is becoming more and more impatient about discovering the outside world and leaving the home of her "creator"...
Poor creatures. In the plural... Because if one could have believed at first glance that the title referred only to Bella (the character incarnated by Emma Stone which is literally of all the planes), the feature film orchestrates the closing of coffins of a whole world and of all the pathetic puppets that inhabit it. In this beer closed sometimes buried a gallery of tricky characters: an apprentice-surgeon cuckold (Ramy Youssef), a conquered lover who gets caught up in his own game (Mark Ruffalo), a second Frankenstein just as attractive but much more limited, a gallery of Parisian prostitutes and an entire bestiary of chimeral beasts as funny as it is worrying.
The only one that seems to escape – and again – is Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), well nicknamed God. The creator (he creates so much of his « Human », its animals « Half-mi » or his students) watch his poor things vegetate – and slowly die – before him. A recurring character at Lánthimos Colin Farrell in Killing the sacred deer, parents in Canine, the couple at the head of the hotel The Lobster, the "gourou" of Alps...), superior, twisted and dispossessed at the same time, which could ultimately embody the Greek director himself. A new Mary Shelley who sews her cruel stories and observes, behind the eye of the camera, how they unfold. Some plans – the recurring fisheye effect or the plan reduced to a blurred round that we would see through the Judas d'une porte – even recall its own intermediate status: the image that simmers on the screen wakes up to its image condition, the spectator gets a brief moment dispossessed of his film and we are reminded of the presence of an interlayered passer...
Black Optimism
And this smuggler delivers us here one of his most optimistic films, despite all the dark macules that glaze his story. We're a long way from the cold surgical Canine or cruel ineluctability of Killing the sacred deer, Poor creatures is a story of emancipation providing hope... Finally, at least in the carcan of the cinema of Lánthimos because the film is still well imbued. A female emancipation, a Frankenstein literally assimilated to her offspring, locked up, raped, who would find escape thanks to a trinity that has nothing hieratic: reading, science and sex. Especially sex elsewhere (but we will come back)... But what strikes the most is the taste for the comedy that goes through Poor creatures. A frank laughter, brought by an irresistible repetition comic and a constant shift taste, as well as a yellow laughter in the face of the escalation of embarrassing scenes of which only Lánthimos has the secret.
The filmmaker who had offered us the Haneke in the text on several occasions diversifies his influences, leaves his panoptic to get closer to his characters, without yet totally dispelling himself from his cynicism and from a good part of very crumbling nihilism.
Gender(s)
In Poor creaturesThe stupre is everywhere. First the twisted, viciated, possessive sex, exercised on this strange cherub Frankenstein so quick to piss off and let himself go to destructive ires assimilable to pre-adolescent crises. Bella-child is led and possessed by men, in a black and white quarter film multiplying the inserts of irritating and repetitive music, but never falling into the quasi-voyeuristic interest that the theme of the Canine For example. A simple unease, tenacious but hovering, which infuses this first part...
Then little by little, Bella turns to be able to doronism. If a persistent disorder of a very oedipian connivance with the father/creator settles, a stage of development is reached: the image abandons its classy black and white to adorn itself with a palette of colors all more vivid than each other. If Lánthimos had used us to a glacial cinema that was parasitic to its palette of colours (Canine and its only chromatic burst based on haemoglobin, The Lobster and its landscapes washed up by rain, the icy monotony of the corridors of Killing the sacred deer), the one which finally points in Poor creatures bursts, sweats, infuses the interiors as much as the exteriors... The finally agreed "fearing buttocks" seem to trigger a late cognitive development at Bella, but also a new momentum in a film that is seriously moving.
And Bella initiates the ascent of the scale of child development, passing anal stages, phallic (a Freudian concept therefore necessarily phallo-centric), genital... And fuelled by her encounters, experiences, readings and experience of the world, Bella will be able to pull out of the strange dominating and masculine matrix in which she was (re)born. Yet, the sex debauchery of Poor creatures Don't stop there... Indeed, in its discovery of the world, Bella will eventually land without a penny in Paris and discover the magic of prostitution.
Frankenhooker
If Frank Henlotter led his mad scientist to wander 42nd Street to delight his prostitutes to cut in order to create his proto-new girlfriend in Frankenhooker (available on Shadowz), Lánthimos initiates the opposite movement: it is his own Frankenstein who will sell his body in Parisian brothels. An excuse to draw an avalanche of explicit scenes all more bizarre than each other? Maybe. The last step towards total sexual emancipation, too. Apotheotic segment by conjugation of a rhythmic music of orgasmic ahanements and slamming of flesh to visual debauchery of plural bodies, repetition ad nauseam turning to the sudden and poetic conclusion of a film that will have filled us with mirettes for more than two hours twenty.
Feminist rearmament
The artistic direction of the feature will give the tournis. Bastard mixture between a Terry Gilliam au top de sa forme et un Tim Burton sous psilocybine, Poor creatures déploie une simili-Terre steampunk aux marqueurs temporels manquants (la Tour Eiffel est-elle en cours de construction ou à moitié détruite ?), écrasée par des lignes de fuites sidérantes et par des cieux que même l’acide des Pink Floyd ne nous ferait pas voir. Un brouillage temporel d’autant plus intéressant que le discours du film sur l’émancipation féminine ne se réduit pas au carcan d’une époque, bien au contraire. En effet, les récents évènements ayant secoué le monde du cinéma et la politique d’un pouvoir startupien qui sent, malgré ses atours de modernité, toujours plus la Vieille France et le virilisme frelaté, nous rappelle malheureusement l’importance d’une telle palabre aujourd’hui encore…
Ajoutons qu’Emma Stone continue à creuser le sillon d’une carrière qui la place de plus en plus comme l’une des actrices américaines les plus intéressantes à suivre, autant par les sommets de cringe qu’elle ose explorer (The Curse se place sans hésitation au panthéon des séries les plus passionnantes de 2023) que par ses projets futurs (elle devrait apparaitre dans le prochain Ari Aster, Eddington, mais aussi dans le prochain Lánthimos déjà tourné). Il est donc plus que temps de foncer découvrir Poor creatures en salles et de rattraper la filmographie du réalisateur grec, qui enchaîne depuis Canine un sacré alignement de chefs-d’œuvre…
Bonus
Pauvres créatures ne vous a pas suffi, vous en voulez encore ? On vous comprend… Et d’ailleurs, s’il y a bien un reproche récurrent à apposer à l’œuvre de Lánthimos au moins depuis Alps, c’est parfois sa volonté d’accumulation et de longueur un peu trop exacerbée, défaut qu’on pourrait imputer également à Poor creatures qui aurait gagné encore en intensité en s’amputant quelques dizaines de minutes… Pourquoi ne pas pencher dès lors sur les courts du réalisateur grec, dont le récent Nimic, tourné pour MUBI en 2019 ?
Une œuvre mutique d’à peine 12 minutes, où un Matt Dillon (The House that Jack Built) père de famille se retrouve piégé dans un étrange jeu de miroir avec une inconnue rencontrée dans le métro (Daphné Patakia). Ludique et insidieux, Nimic plonge son spectateur dans un environnement du tout-venant dépersonnalisé à l’extrême, l’invitant lui-aussi à prendre part à ce mystérieux “retrouvez les sept erreurs” aux conséquences autrement plus désastreuses. Intriguant, ultra court et efficace, une avant-séance parfaite avant le visionnage du génialissime Poor creatures. Et ne reste plus qu’à attendre impatiemment Kinds of Kindness, le prochain Lánthimos encore avec Emma Stone et Willem Dafoe, qui devrait prendre la forme d’un film anthologique ! Il se murmure même que le long-métrage serait déjà tourné, on ne devrait ainsi pas avoir à trop attendre avant de pouvoir le découvrir…
Je me réserve cette critique après visionnage dès mon retour de Gérardmer ! Mais mon petit doigt me dit que ça sent bon !
En tant que petit doigt officiel d’Arthur, je confirme le film est vraiment bouleversant. C’est pas souvent qu’on voit un film aussi prenant, qui vous fait ressentir tout un tas d’émotions en si peu de temps 🙂
Héhé trop cool si t’as aimé ! J’ai pas vu “La Favorite”, mais je suis assez étonné de ce virage dans la carrière de Lanthimos (et me réjouis surtout de la suite…).
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