After La Favorite, Yorgos Lanthimos reunites with Emma Stone for his new film, Pauvres Créatures, a work that plays with shapes and colors, and always with the offbeat tone characteristic of the Greek filmmaker. The film won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, the equivalent of the Palme d'Or at the second most important film festival in the world after Cannes. It also won the Golden Globe for Best Comedy Film and Best Actress for Emma Stone. Scheduled for release in cinemas on January 17.
This time, the director turns his attention to the gothic, with this adaptation ofAlasdair Gray's 2003 novel of the same name. Poor Creatures is a retelling of Frankenstein and 19th-century Gothic tales. The film tells the story of Bella Baxter(Emma Stone), a young woman brought back to life by the brilliant and unorthodox Dr. Godwin Baxter(Willem Dafoe). Under his protection, she's eager to learn. Eager to discover the world she knows nothing about, she elopes with Duncan Wedderburn(Mark Ruffalo), a shrewd and debauched lawyer, and embarks on a dizzying odyssey across the continents.
Pauvres Créatures: where were the Paris scenes from the film starring Emma Stone shot?
In "Poor Creatures", the new film by Yorgos Lanthimos, Emma Stone's character discovers many capitals, including Paris. Was the film shot in the French capital? [Read more]
Where Poor Creatures impresses from the outset is in its staging and artistic direction. Initially, Yorgos Lanthimos borrows heavily from German Expressionism, and the first part of the film is reminiscent of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Later, he gains even more virtuosity with the transition to color and other continents, filmed as fairytale worlds. This dazzlingly photographed fantasy vision shows us how young Bella sees her surroundings, with the naiveté of her condition: a woman who has just been (re)born, in the body of an adult. And if she starts out with a mental age close to infancy, she gains in intellect as she travels, but retains her innocence, which makes her a delightful character, flouting social dogma and propriety, fulfilling her desires as she experiences them. This makes her an unpredictable, unflappable character, while everyone around her sinks into madness as they try to make her their own.
In fact, Poor Creatures can be seen as a profoundly feminist film, since its primary theme is the independence of this woman, whose life depends on the men around her. But that's not all, for this is a multi-faceted film, with numerous themes and narrative arcs. And the eerie strangeness of the mise-en-scène, as well as the gloomy atmosphere of the settings and characters, give the whole thing a very special flavor, as if you'd never seen a film like it before. Its success at the Venice Film Festival, the Golden Globes and its predicted success at the Oscars bear witness to this.
The icing on the cake is that the trio of lead actors are formidable, led by Emma Stone in one of her best roles, but especially Mark Ruffalo, hilarious in his ridiculousness and pity. As for Willem Dafoe, he's simply terrifying. In short, Poor Creatures is one of the first great films of 2024.
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