Poor things. The modern whorehoundheus

 English corner

Last best picture winner at the Oscars, Poor things, is filled with lots of controversial topics, some of them really disturbing that I would like to point out. 

It’s true that Yorgos, the director, is good at creating iconic scenes. I agree that visually it’s an excellent movie and the performances, cinematography, and costume design help to create a kind of gothic Frankenstein’ story but the message it's sending is horrible. 

Please, save me

Let’s start with the main character, Bella Buxter, who has her own baby brain inside her body after a surgery made by her creator/dad. He found her body after she committed suicide and because he is scientist he had to experiment with her body, you know, he cannot leave her in peace. So throughout the story we, as an audience, see she is a baby, a toddler, a teenager and, at the end of the movie, I guess she would be at her twenties. What’s the problem -aport from the abomination the scientist made-? The men who interact with her. All of them wants to take sexual advantages of her -apart from her dad who is eunuch, lucky she-. One of them even kidnaps her with the consent of her dad. They love her childish behavior, her innocence and her lack of understanding how the world works but with adult woman's body.

 If the audience didn’t have enough with this apology of the pedophilia, the apology and idealization of prostitution appear on the scene. We watch Bella travelling around the world, being free and enjoying the pleasures of it. And what is the first thing a woman does when she is free -according to the men like Yorgos-? Being a prostitute, of course.  Almost all women,at some point of their lives, have been told by men that if they were women they will definitely be prostitutes. I think Yorgos agrees with this statement and has decided to make a movie about that and, according to him, we must believe this is a woman’s empowerment. How many movies portray men wishing to be prostitutes as an act of freedom? How many men would actually like to have sex with people they don’t desire? If it’s so empowerment they could start doing it and create examples.  In poor things this is even a “funny job” with funny “clients” (better say whorehounds) that, in order to create a bohemian atmosphere, it takes place in the artistic Paris of the 19th century . At some point Bella gets tired of this life and comes back home. She is not traumatized at all, she just leaves the brothel like it was any kind of “job”, maybe Yorgos needs a little bit of brutal reality here. 

Emma Stone: What the hell was I thinking when I decided to produce this movie?

However, he doesn’t want us to complain too much and he adds some elements so we can leave the cinema with good taste in our mouth: he makes her reading lots of books that makes her more conscious about the world, the social classes, and trade unions. She even becomes a scientist! So she ends up transplanting a goat brain into her former evil husband body. What the director didn’t realize was that even that ending can be as bad as the beginning because she becomes what she rejects: her dad.

Summering up, this is not a woman empowerment film and it’s not feminist at all because it doesn’t approach to those topics with a critic view, just with complacency.