ALSO SHOWING
Poor Things JJJJ
(18) “Readers who want a good story plainly told should go at once to the main part of the book.” So wrote Alasdair Gray in the faux introduction for Poor Things – and so director Yorgos Lanthimos obliges, sort of, with this entertainingly ribald adaptation to bring the twisted story at the heart of Gray’s 1992 opus to life in sumptuous fashion.
That story revolves around Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), whom we first glimpse from behind leaping from Tower Bridge in full technicolour and next see in monochrome, childlike and inquisitive, bashing away on a piano with her feet. How these two images of Bella connect will soon be revealed, but Lanthimos wastes no time tuning us into the distorted reality of her sheltered existence, frequently deploying fisheye lenses and peephole cameras to bend and contract the ornate surroundings she shares with her guardian Godwin Baxter (Dafoe), his assistant Max Mccandles (Ramy Youssef ) and an array of surgically altered hybrid pets, among them a barking hen and a feathered dog.
These surgical abominations are the product of Godwin’s experiments. An anatomist by trade, he’s very much a Victor Frankenstein figure.
Frankenstein, was, of course a big influence on Gray, whose novel is a playfully parodic, postmodern twirl through the machinations of Victorian melodrama – or “sham gothic” as a character in one of its nested storylines disparagingly describe its plot, stitched together as it is with elements of Frankenstein, Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Pygmalion and the more lurid work of Edger Allan Poe. Likewise, Lanthimos mixes elements of David Lynch, Terry Gilliam, steampunk and – when the film bursts into colour as Bella later escapes into the world – the technicolour marvels of Powell and Pressburger. And yet it’s also very much in keeping with the cloistered realities of Lanthimos’s own films. As it follows Bella’s sexual awakening and dawning consciousness as a woman unencumbered by the patriarchal restrictions of polite society, the film becomes a twisted story of self-liberation.
In this instance, though, sex is the key and the film and its star aren’t shy about making its heroine’s proclivities integral to Bella’s emergence as a force of nature. From the moment she discovers the joy of masturbation by pleasuring herself with an apple, she re-writes the rules of sexual propriety, ditching Godwin and Max (to whom she’s become engaged) and fornicating her way across Europe in the company of a lawyer by the name of Duncan Wedderburn, a moustache-twirling cad, hilariously played by Mark Ruffalo, who soon proves no match for her. Indeed, her refusal to kowtow to the mores of polite society soon exposes Wedderburn for the illiberal coward he is and, as her sexual self-education continues unabated with a stint in a Parisian brothel, her knowledge of the world and its injustices and inequalities gradually transforms her into a fully realised person whose quest to find out where she came from leads to a twist partially borrowed from Gray’s novel. General release
The Boys in the Boat (12A) JJ
Directed by George Clooney The Boys in the Boat is an underdog sports movie so full of clichés you could snooze your way through whole sections and not feel like you’d missed anything. Based on the true story of the American rowing team who competed in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, it’s a sugary, aw-shucks tale of decent, blue collar students proving to their Ivy League peers that money is no match for hard work and determination. Calum Turner takes the lead as the poorest of the bunch, narrating the story to his grandson, with all the rose-tinted perspective you’d expect. Joel Edgerton is thetaciturn-coach who just knows his boys have it in them.
General release