Hairless in the Basement: “Bugonia”

Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos is not one to play it safe. Neither, apparently, is Emma Stone. The Internet tells me that Lanthimos is a part of the so-called “Greek Weird Wave.” Unlike such earlier Greek filmmakers as the great Michael Cacoyannis—who dramatized classical tragedies like Electra (1962) and The Trojan Women (1971) while also bringing a full range of dramatic colors to 1964’s modern-day Zorba the Greek—Lanthimos is not interested in ennobling his characters. He seems to have real affection for the grotesque. I haven’t seen all of his English-language films. But The Lobster, in which single adults are given 45 days to find a mate or risk being turned into the animal of their choice, is both bizarre and extremely entertaining. And I loved Lanthimos’s first collaboration with Emma Stone, in 2018’s The Favourite, which made me regard the 18^th century British monarchy in a whole new light. None of this, though, prepared me for Poor Things (2023), a kind of berserk Frankenstein story in which Stone’s young adult character starts out with a small child’s brain, then develops a teenager’s libido, before finally reaching a kind of mental and emotional maturity. (The Oscar Stone won for this role was definitely well-deserved.)

 In this year’s Bugonia (the title refers to an ancient Greek folk ritual involving bees and cow dung), Lanthimos and Stone are together once again. And once again he seems to enjoy systematically destroying her wide-eyed beauty in the name of grim humor. In the film, Stone plays a soignée big pharma exec who works out of a hypermodern building set in the rural American countryside. She’s a powerhouse at work, but this doesn’t stop her from being kidnapped by two scruffy locals and imprisoned in their basement. The older one, Teddy, is played by the recently ubiquitous Jesse Plemons, who—with his always disheveled red hair—is looking more and more like Opie gone to seed. He’s the idea guy: the one who is absolutely convinced that Stone’s Michelle is really a dangerous space alien sent to threaten Planet Earth. The younger, Don, is Teddy’s always-loyal cousin. (He’s played by young Alban Delbis, who is genuinely afflicted with autism. A star of his SoCal high school’s drama class, Delbis gives an impressively moving performance.)

 The notion that a successful entrepreneur in a business suit and heels would  be accused by a doofus or two of actually coming from outer space sounds like it could make for fun at the movies. That’s what I thought my evening would be like, but the film’s poster should really have disabused me of that notion. Though a few of my fellow filmgoers managed to guffaw a time or two, Bugonia is hard to classify as a comedy, even a very dark one. Yes, there are some unexpected plot twists that encourage us to smirk, but I defy anyone to chuckle at the film’s gut-punching ending.

 Most critical reviews of Bugonia have been positive, I’m told, My hometown newspaper, The Los Angeles Times, titles its strong review “It’s Emma Stone’s planet now as the alien comedy ‘Bugonia’ proves.” The focus by the Times critic is on how cleverly Stone plays with our emotions, and how much she endures for her art, up to and including having the hair on her head brutally shaved off on camera. To promote the film’s opening, a Culver City theatre staged a promo performance exclusively for bald people, or those who were willing to lose their locks on-site. But despite the resulting hoopla, I’m sensing that audiences—with or without hair—are staying away.

Poor Things: Barbie Goes Victorian

You’ve heard of Dr. Frankenstein, who created a monster out of bits and pieces of human beings. And you’ve heard of Pygmalion, the ancient Greek who sculpted a beautiful woman and then fell in love with her. (The story was modernized by George Bernard Shaw, author of a play about linguist Henry Higgins, who turns a cockney flower girl into a duchess by teaching her how to speak the King’s English. Of course, Shaw’s play became a beloved romantic musical, My Fair Lady, in which confirmed bachelor Higgins and former flower-seller Eliza Doolittle come together in the finale.)    

 I mention all of the above because a current hit film, Poor Things, combines elements of the Frankenstein monster with Pygmalion’s beloved Galatea. The pieced-together woman who develops into an unlikely love object first shows up in this film as a childlike innocent who can barely speak, and walks with an unsteady gait. The odd and fascinating details behind her creation are something you won’t hear from me. Suffice it to say that she calls her much-disfigured patron “God” (his name is Dr. Godwin Baxter), and that initially she clings to his every word. But her boundless appetite for life leads her to discover corners of the world—and her own body—she was not anticipating. So she’s off on a series of erotic adventures in the various capitals of Victorian Europe, portrayed via Yorgos Lanthimos’ highly original filmmaking as the most charming of stage sets. (Lanthimos seems to share with Wes Anderson a passion for fanciful art direction, but I’m convinced Lanthimos, who previously released The Lobster and The Favourite, has much more to say.)

 It's easy enough to call Poor Things kinky. Certainly it’s full of sexual couplings, blunt language, and body-revealing costumes (and the lack thereof). We certainly see a great deal of Emma Stone, who—in the innocent-abroad role of Bella Baxter—discovers both the joys and the humiliations of sex. It’s fun to remember that Stone, a producer as well as the star of this film, made her breakthrough in 2010’s Easy A. There she played the bravura role of  a smart, nerdy (and virginal) teen who pretends to be the local tramp as a way to navigate the rigid social scene at her high school. In Poor Things, the “tramp” label would have no meaning for Bella. Totally committed to satisfying her own wants and needs, she judges the behavior of others in terms of the level of satisfaction they bring to her. Still, she’s constantly evolving, learning that the bed-jumping that had so delighted her in the arms of the roguish Duncan Wedderburn (a slimy Mark Ruffalo) is not always the route to personal satisfaction.

 Bella’s path turns out to be full of men who want to control her. There is, first of all, her “creator,” the obsessive scientist eerily played by Willem Dafoe. There is Wedderburn, a sexual libertine who finds the tables turned when he falls for Bella. There’s another man who emerges late in the film, and seems to have the means to bend her to his will. All these can be said, by final fadeout, to be among the “poor things” to which the title refers. Men don’t fare well in this film, except perhaps for Max (Ramy Youssef), the gentle science nerd who loves Bella for herself.

  Poor Things is a triumph of cinematography, musical scoring, set design, and the melding of past and present. Bella Baxter is a heroine for today, a Barbie who has taken a different (but parallel) route to self-realization.

 

The Favourite: Three’s a Royal Crowd

Today, because we’re living in the #MeToo era, we’re well accustomed to seeing powerful men indulge themselves by making the women around them bend to their will. In The Favourite, by Yorgos Lanthimos, who had previously amused and puzzled filmgoers with The Lobster, #MeToo is stood on its head. The film’s chief female characters are anything but helpless victims. Instead, the eighteenth-century women played by Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone are rude, crude, and very much on the make. No shrinking violets, they gravitate toward power, and know how to use sexuality (as well as belligerence and guile) in order to get it. Unfortunately for them, each is determined to replace the other, in a struggle that becomes increasingly grizzly as the film wears on.

How curious that their target is not only another woman but one of royal birth. The historical record tells us that  Queen Anne of Great Britain, the last monarch of the Stuart line, was fated by circumstance to not have an easy time on the throne. By 1702, when her twelve-year reign began, she had lost a beloved husband to smallpox and buried seventeen young children, many of whom were stillborn. Badly afflicted with gout, Anne suffered great pain. As portrayed in the movie by the impressive Olivia Colman, she was a vain and indecisive woman, easy prey for the domineering Lady Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz), who advanced her husband’s military career and her own social standing by effectively making policy on Anne’s behalf.

Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, is a genuine historic figure, an ancestor of both Winston Churchill and Princess Diana. I suspect that Abigail, the character played by Emma Stone, has no such historical roots. Still, she fits nicely into Lanthimos’s portrayal of the British royal court. The daughter of a down-on-his-luck aristocrat, she has the smarts and the breeding to succeed at court, even though she starts as a lowly scullery maid. A tart tongue and a shrewd grasp of the court’s power dynamics gets her into the presence of Queen Anne; flattery and sexual wiles keep her there. But like Sarah, she is not destined to achieve contentment. That’s part of the price you pay when sucking up to royalty: you can easily be replaced when the monarch moves on to something (or someone) else.

Colman’s portrait of Queen Anne is a deeply memorable one, though it’s doubtless not the final word on Anne’s achievements. There’s evidence she took serious interest in affairs of state, and did at least some good while on the throne, serving as a patroness of theatre, poetry, and music. She subsidized the career of one of England’s greatest composers, George Frederick Handel, and knighted Isaac Newton in 1705. But basically The Favourite left me relieved that my own nation is not subject to the whims of an hereditary ruler, nor to those of the courtiers who (at least temporarily) find favor in royal eyes. Still, Americans have come to know what it’s like to be under the leadership of someone who is mercurial, impetuous, and susceptible to flattery. Which is one more way that The Favourite, a tale of eighteenth-century England, seems all too appropriate for the United States of America in 2019.

 As always in British films of this ilk, production values are dazzling, though the movie is also marked by Lanthimos’s occasional oddball aesthetic choices. Period costumes and music vie for our attention with graphic nudity and strange, grotesque moments (like some choreography with moves that look suspiciously like break-dancing) that remind us we’re in the 21^st century after all.