Yorgos Lanthimos is a mad genius of filmmaking. Having managed to make a rather unexpected emergence into the mainstream off of The Favourite, which took his usually osmium-thick storytelling style and made it accessible to a larger audience, his latest feature is as much a departure from that as The Favourite was from The Killing Of A Sacred Deer. DP Robbie Ryan is still offering a peephole-view into a world that is wildly different from what we charitably consider to be ‘reality’, and writer Tony McNamara is still finding new and deliciously colourful ways to describe the most vulgar shit, but what Lanthimos has brought them together for this time around is something truly special.
Even in a year populated by filmmakers taking the biggest swings
of their entire careers to date, Lanthimos’ efforts here with the visuals still
manage to stand out as something especially epic and captivating. The
gloriously elaborate set and costume design, along with the impossibly rich and
vivid colour palette, make every single frame look stunning all on their own,
let alone when stitched together with Yorgos Mavropsaridis’ dream machine
editing and backed by Jerskin Fendrix's 'what if Clint Mansell did The Greasy Strangler?' soundtrack.
Robbie Ryan has mentioned Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula as a primary influence for how the film looks, and the absurdist ‘fuck your budget’ extravagance on display has a certain Terry Gilliam energy to it, but the main thing this reminded me of is the pure fantasy evoked in the films of Georges Méliès. That approach to filmmaking from before realism became the ‘respectable’ standard, when editing was a kind of magic and each frame would’ve been lovingly hand-painted to create a comparable intensity of colour.
Of course, it really says something when this has some of the strongest visuals of any film I’ve looked at this year… and yet that isn’t even close to my favourite thing about it. No, that would handedly go to Emma Stone in the lead role of Bella Baxter, an experiment of the brilliantly-cast Willem Dafoe as Dr. God(win Baxter). Said experiment involved bringing a pregnant suicide victim back to life through Frankensteinian means, and then replacing her brain with that of her unborn child. She’s basically an extreme version of the central thought experiment in Dark City, creating an adult with the absolute purity and innocence of a child to try and build a whole new personality from the ground-up.
Bella might be one of the single most autism-coded characters of any media I’ve sat through, film or otherwise. The way that God describes her as having her mind and body out of sync with each other in terms of age is basically my go-to in describing ASD and developmental disorders in general, and her mannerisms later on perfectly capture that sense of social directness and unshakeable curiosity about her specialised subjects that I recognise wholeheartedly from my own experiences.
Her condition really speaks to the reality of those on the spectrum, where social behaviours that others consider second-nature are things we had to learn. But since a lot of those same behavioural patterns go against our natural instincts, and repressing those instincts ends up adding further strain to our ability to function day-by-day, we end up having to unlearn them as adults.
Not that it’s ever as easy as all that. After spending so much of our formative years being, ahem, ‘strongly recommended’ that we mask our baseline behaviour, that enforced suggestion can become so ingrained, so unconscious, that it becomes automatic routine even when there’s literally no one else around to even remotely care about how ‘abnormal’ you’re apparently acting. It's the difference between actively resisting the need to stim while out in public (already something that shouldn’t be insisted upon), and actively resisting the need to stim while inside your own bedroom. It's a special kind of dread when you can't even be sure what parts of your everyday behaviour are actually your own.
Some days, the kind of total mental reset offered by Dr. God's experiment feels like the only way to get that stupid mask to come off.
There’s also something about the heightened emotionality Bella exhibits at times, like when she breaks down in tears about the poor and destitute in Alexandria, that refutes the stereotype of those on the spectrum as devoid of emotion; if anything, we experience too damn much of it at once.
Then there’s the sex. Oh dear Dude, is there the sex; it’s basically Bella’s hyperfixation for the majority of the film’s narrative, and there are no shortage of sex scenes to be found here. Now, depicting the sexual lives of those with developmental disorders (or, at the very least, those that can correspond with them) is something I can be very picky about; I’ve lacerated films like Siblings Of The Cape and You Won’t Be Alone for (in my opinion) completely ballsing up the topic. Which is why I’m thankful that this handles the subject as well as it does, and even manages to stand out amongst the more recent sex-positive message films I’ve seen recently.
Bella’s connection with her sexuality is something that springs from herself, and is ultimately one of the few things about her that positively did not originate from somewhere else, and the way both her character and the film around her explore that connection is quite beautiful in its own way. It’s treated as something absolute, something that exists and must be embraced, regardless of what anyone else thinks, which is a stance I am 100% behind.
And yet that is still only part of the larger point being
driven at here, where feminine sexuality is a cornerstone for femininity writ
large. Bella’s magical mystery tour across the world, learning about philosophy
and politique and sex and what it means to be a person, has her encounter many
a man (and madame) who, through various means and at various volumes, seek to control her and her libido.
God overprotects out of misplaced paternal instinct and struggling with the toxic influence of his own father. Mark Ruffalo’s Duncan
goes full-blown institutionalised incel because he can’t handle Bella having
any kind of autonomy, embodying the Nice Guy attitude of 'Don't let society tell you what to do, let me tell you what to do'. Jerrod Carmichael’s Harry thinks that Bella's idealism is futile in a
world populated by such a “fucked species” as humanity, and deliberately tries to break her purity. Kathryn Hunter as Madame Swiney imparts the cruel but supposedly necessary nature of capitalism on Bella, with Suzy Bemba's Toinette serving as the socialist rebuttal to that notion. And Christopher Abbott’s Alfie… is just the worst.
The worst. Even Ramy Youssef's Max, who serves as the voice of the audience early on, ends up falling into similar controlling behaviour, albeit with a bit more of a point in not wanting Bella to be stuck with the aforementioned duplicity of Duncan.
It is against all of that garbage that Bella stands tall as a paragon of the unorthodox. A woman who abjectly refuses to let anyone or anything define her, other than what she herself considers to be her. She cuts through the bullshit, says exactly what she thinks, knows exactly what she wants, and has no qualms in getting it, no matter what control system others try to chain her to. If she wants to engage in furious jumping until her partner can’t even stand anymore, so be it. If she wants to explore every corner of this crazy world to find where she fits into it, so be it. And if she wants to help ensure that no one else has to unlearn behavioural patterns that were forced on them to begin with, then so. Fucking. Be it.
When I call this a grand and profoundly autistic fantasy, I mean that as the highest compliment I am capable of bestowing. Aside from the phenomenal film craft on offer, creating the most sumptuous sensory feast in a year with quite the impressive menu, its central character and her journey of self-liberation convey a Platonic ideal of genuine human freedom. Freedom to learn what we want, say what we want, fuck who we want, and just be what we want. It effectively portrays sexuality within a neurodivergent framework, avoiding any potentially distasteful consent issues without running into the other extreme of just assuming that NDs are completely lacking in healthy sexual expression. That that stance is within a larger package to do with the core tenet of feminism (having the right to choose for oneself in all matters of life), experiential hedonism as the surest way to discover the self, and an anarcho-socialist rejection of unjust control systems is just icing on the cake for me. Yorgos Lanthimos, this might just be your masterpiece.
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