If there’s one thing that can be said quite definitively about Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest awards season darling Poor Things, it’s that it’s definitely a Yorgos Lanthimos film.
With that distinctive, multi-pronged injection of absurdity into just about every textual and subtextual aspect you can think of, Poor Things is a film that serves up the ever-important combination of making you squirm and setting you free. That’s largely through the wonderfully astute performance of one Emma Stone, whose leading role of Bella Baxter came with a handful of curious challenges, some trickier than others.
Speaking at the breakfast panel during the Producers Guild of America Awards, Stone—who also serves as a producer on Poor Things—had a characteristically hilarious response when asked if she faced any struggles in filming Bella’s racier moments (which played no small part in the film, at that), saying that the expertly-choreographed sex scenes, which everyone seems to be very curious about, was actually one of the easier hurdles that came with bringing Bella to life.
Those were quick. We knew exactly what we were doing. Figuring out how to walk, or eat 60 Portuguese tarts, which at first bite are really delicious, but by the end you really want to puke, her seeing death and decay was much more challenging than the nudity, which is the only thing people seem to want to ask me about. I get it. It’s provocative.
Whether it’s Emma Stone guiding Bella on a sexual odyssey or Barry Keoghan dancing full-frontal in the halls of Saltburn, nudity gets treated as though it’s some sensational selling point while simultaneously being an offensive taboo in a culture that’s about as obsessed with sanitization as it is with sexuality.
In all of that manufactured noise, the idea of nudity being so much more than a vehicle for provocation seems to have been lost. Nudity is vulnerable, earthly, and about as natural as natural gets, and in an increasingly unnatural world, maybe nudity that understands itself as nudity is key to the artistic respite we all need.
(featured image: Searchlight Pictures)
