Transcript: Culture chat — Is ‘Poor Things’ a feminist film?

This is an audio transcript of the Life and Art from FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘Culture chat — Is ‘Poor Things’ a feminist film?’

Lilah Raptopoulos
Welcome to Life and Art from FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos, and this is our Friday chat show. This week we are talking about the much discussed film Poor Things. It’s directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, who’s also known for The Lobster and The Favourite, and it’s based on the 1992 novel by Alistair Gray. Poor Things tells the story of Bella Baxter, played by Emma Stone. She’s a young woman in Victorian London whose brain has been replaced by a baby’s brain. When the film starts, she’s a grown woman, acting completely infantile, but Bella grows quickly, and she soon discovers sex and philosophy and the world, and turns out to love life. 

[‘POOR THINGS’ MOVIE CLIP PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
So far ‘Poor Things’ has had a very positive critical response, and it’s been nominated for 11 Oscars. But it’s also quite strange and has made people feel quite uneasy. So we’re here to talk about it. I’m Lilah and I must go and punch that baby. Joining me from London is our arts editor, Jan Dalley. Jan, we usually do quotes to introduce everyone, but almost every other quote from this film is sexually explicit, so I have to just politely welcome you and say it’s such a pleasure to have you. 

Jan Dalley
Hi. It’s a pleasure to be here. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
And also in London is the great HTSI editor, Jo Ellison. Hi, Jo. Welcome. 

Jo Ellison
Hi. How are you? 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Good. How are you? 

Jo Ellison
Very well. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Great. So I can’t tell you both what a pleasure it is to have both of you in one episode together and how excited I am to talk about a film that is so wild and so confusing. I’m gonna ask first what your topline reactions are. Jan, what did you think? 

Jan Dalley
For the first five or 10 minutes of this movie, I thought, let me out of here. I thought, I’m gonna hate this. It’s everything I hate. It’s kind of Bish Bosch, sci-fi, overdressed, over, kind of coy, overdone. And I was hating it. And then as time went on, and a lot of time goes by, by the way, it is a very long film, but it didn’t take very long for me to get much more seduced by it. And I ended up not feeling it was too long. And I ended up being very, very, beguiled by it and found lots to think about. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Jo, what about you? How did you feel? 

Jo Ellison
I think probably precisely the opposite. I went in and went, oh, great. European, oh a house of perspective, slightly different aesthetic values, a kind of adventure to go on and then spend the last hour screaming, get me out of here! (Laughter) Is this ever gonna end? I was like, really like desperately, desperately wanting it to finish. But I think overall I probably, I have to say that was quite average-y, a bit of a six-and-a-half out of 10 for me. Like, a lot to like, lots to enjoy. I laughed out loud a lot. I found her characterisation really fabulous, but I just didn’t love it structurally, which is incredibly boring. Boring criticism, but that was, yeah, that was my takeaway. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s interesting. You know, I left thinking I probably won’t see that movie again, but I really liked it. And then a couple of days later, I was still thinking about how much I liked it, and I realised that, maybe it was my favourite movie of this year, which kind of surprised me. Even though I know it’s morally questionable to put a woman’s fetus’s brain into her brain and then have that baby brain have a sexual awakening, among other things, it seems sort of like a, just an interesting thought experiment to watch a woman who just had no context and no sense of shame make her way through the world.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So the way this movie plays out is that once Bella reaches like, probably maybe mental adolescence, she meets this man, played by Mark Ruffalo, who sweeps her off her feet and asks her to go with him to Portugal. And she decides to go. So the film is sort of broken up in chapters where in every chapter she’s sort of learning a different thing. In Portugal, she’s learning about the sumptuousness of life, and then they’re on a ship. And then in Alexandria, she learns about poverty. And then in Paris, she does this period of sex work. It’s chapterised like that. Is there anything else you would add to that? 

Jan Dalley
Well, I think it’s very important that it’s a learning journey and that even though he is trying to control her all the time, she doesn’t let herself be controlled. She behaves fantastically badly. Everything from, you know, being kind of sick in restaurants to everything you can imagine. But also she is learning along the way. She suddenly discovers books, and he’s very jealous and threatened by this. So we see her gaining her independence and her own way of discovering the world. And, she’s growing increasingly away from her dependence on the men around her. It’s almost corny, actually. It’s probably a flaw in the film, if anything. But you kind of know what’s gonna happen next. So in a sense, it’s a very, very simple story. It’s a simple progression towards the ultimate liberation. 

Jo Ellison
Yeah, I agree, I think that idea of that kind of beautiful naivety and someone so unformed just experiencing life as pleasure is, in a way, tickled a kind of feminist fantasy for me. But the sort of endless repetition of sex and the kind of nastiness of it, I started becoming a bit more uncomfortable with it. I could have lived with maybe 12 fewer experiences. (Laughter)

Jan Dalley
Yeah, we certainly got the point early on. That’s for sure.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right, right. 

Jan Dalley
Yes. I agree that there maybe are one too many of these episodes, some of them more fantastical and more kind of crazily surreal than others. I think that these issues about shame or lack of it, about the way a woman faces the conventions of the world, becomes very complicated and is demanded in all kinds of ways. During her time in Paris, we get a lot of sex. A lot. And they’re very, very grotesque scenes. Then there’s nothing fabulous or fantastical about these sexual encounters. They’re quite brutish. And yet she actually emerges from them un-humiliated. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
One of my favourite lines of the film is when she’s asked about her experience being a prostitute in Paris, and she says, I tired a bit, but it was fascinating. 

Jo Ellison
And that’s quite, that’s what’s so charming about her throughout. She does not lose her charm or her appetite for her curiosity. And I think that’s why, you know, I think she’s essentially so winning. And also, I mean, the film is grotesque and kind of disgusting, but it’s also so sumptuous and beautiful. So it’s this really weird, sort of surrealist, kind of fantasy maugery of like, weird landscapes and fabulous outfits and kind of delicious food, piles of food and dancing. And you get really like, so the aesthetic is so powerful. You just, it’s incredibly immersive, which I think is another huge element of it. Like you’re . . . It’s very visceral, the whole thing. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yes. Let’s talk about that. It’s very sumptuous. It’s aesthetically stunning. Jo, I’ve been wanting to ask you for your thoughts on the fashion. 

Jo Ellison
Well, I think I’ve read something really interesting from the costume designer recently. She talked a lot about that, leg of mutton shoulder shape that she wears throughout. Like, it’s an incredibly huge shoulder. And it has historically always been attributed to periods of time in which women have been powerful, not least Elizabeth I. So she’s got that sort of Elizabethan, powerful virgin kind of queen vibe, which is, with a very powerful eyebrow and the crazy dark hair, like, she’s so striking to look at as well as everything else. And then the sets are incredible. The sets were all done by the art director Shona Heath, who we used to work a lot with the photographer Tim Walker, and they always would create these fabulous sets that are like fantasy sets, and she’s really kind of come out. I think it’s the first film she worked on, and she’s done a phenomenal job of creating this universe. I mean, like all day. I mean, it’s like absolutely arresting. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, yeah.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

OK. I would love to get a little deeper into some of the themes of the film. The most obvious one is the depiction of women and sexuality. It has divided a lot of people. The Guardian asked 14 critics for their take, and they were basically all entirely different. I’m just gonna throw my opinion out there first, which is that I like that this film made people feel different things. You know, one of the criticisms is that it’s a male-gaze fantasy, that it was made by a male director, a male screenwriter based on a man’s novel, and it’s showing this woman who really loves sex. I agree that three men making a film about a woman is kind of a bummer, but I think it feels reductive to, like, then fobbed the whole thing off as male gazey and not worth it. Like, one, I don’t think that the sex is sexy at all. It’s not like sexualising her. Two, even as Bella learns about the world, she never learns shame and she never succumbs to shame. And, I think that that’s interesting and pretty cool. And I also think, just like, why does a woman enjoying sex have to be considered a male fantasy? 

Jan Dalley
Well, I’m very much with you on that. That was the point I was gonna make. I’m amazed that everybody thinks that the idea of a woman who’s completely uninhibited about sex is a male fantasy. Surely it’s a female fantasy. Surely lots of us would kind of secretly or not so secretly like to be like that. Maybe not exactly. Maybe not exactly like Bella, but certainly the idea of being liberated from some of our hang ups and some of our preconceptions, you know, there’s nothing frightening about that. It’s an idea and there’s nothing necessarily, certainly nothing misogynist about it, I’m sure. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right, right, right. So, you know, it reminds me that a lot of people have been comparing this film to Barbie. I’m curious what you think about that. 

Jo Ellison
I do think there is something quite weird in the whole, you know, dialogue around, like, all the nominations and what’s getting the attention. But where these two things seem to sit like is the complete, is the Madonna-whore kind of complex right there, like Barbie on the one hand, blonde, beautiful. You got Bella on the other, kind of like crazy, you know, dark-haired, sort of one turned lust lover. It’s like the perfect, it’s sort of kind of set up for a cultural conversation, isn’t it? But they’re just, it’s just been quite a fortunate happenstance. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. It is. I was gonna ask you both if you think that it’s a feminist film. A lot of people are disagreeing about that. When I left, I felt like, you know, this is maybe a better version of exploring feminism than Barbie, because I felt like Barbie’s version of feminism was like, you know, great for kids, good to hear. But it felt kind of like Pussy Hat 2.0 feminism, Hillary Clinton feminism. I felt like we already knew . . . 

Jo Ellison
Well, clean and nice and women supporting each other and like, all the nice things, but not just women doing their own thing and, you know, not giving a damn. And so from that, to that extent, I think probably it is a feminist film. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Jan, what do you think? 

Jan Dalley
Well, I think that it’s interesting to think about the Madonna-whore thing. I completely agree that the comparison with Barbie is really fascinating and is probably one of the reasons why this film has had so much interest that, you know, everybody obsessed about Barbie for a bit, but I mean, there wasn’t, in the end really that much to say about Barbie. I thought it was quite boring compared to this, which is infinitely more complicated. But in a funny sort of way, this is a film in which you can’t even talk about women in the plural, because there’s one woman in this film, she . . . there are no others. She has no comparisons except for a few, very, very incidental characters. Eventually she makes a friend who is another prostitute. But I think this is a film about a woman without women. And this is a . . . A person who’s . . .  

Jo Ellison
Does that make it feminist? 

Jan Dalley
No, no, no. No, I don’t think . . . I honestly don’t think it’s a term you can apply. I think the interesting experiment is to think about what it would be if a female baby in a woman’s body grew up without any female models at all, without any role models of any sort. So the Madonna-whore dichotomy literally doesn’t exist for her because those are both social constructs, very powerfully determined social constructs. And the point is she didn’t have any social constructs. So I think that, feminist or not feminist is the wrong question here in a way, because I think we’re talking about an individual. Yes, she’s a woman. And that becomes very important. But I just don’t think that’s the right question to be asking. 

Jo Ellison
I’d rather be Bella Baxter than Barbie. 

Jan Dalley
God, yeah. (Laughter)

Jo Ellison
But, like, she was really . . . She was getting a lot more of, like, (inaudible) she was . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, totally. 

Jan Dalley
And she had a lot more choices. Custard pies at every turn . . . (Laughter)

Lilah Raptopoulos
I mean it’s true. I think that the outrage really seems to stem from this idea that Bella represents what all women would be like if they were freed from some shackles of shame. And I think you’re right. It’s, we’re not seeing all women represented. We’re seeing this one woman in this sort of thought experiment. 

Jan Dalley
Well, a lot of things happened to her. One is that she discovers books. We don’t actually quite work out how she’s learned to read because she certainly can’t write very well. But, she discovers books and then suddenly, you know, books are becoming more important as sex. And yeah, we kind of all know that feeling sometimes. But she’s discovered reading. She’s discovered the urge to learn. She’s discovered all kinds of things which have nothing to do with the men or the sex. So we’re seeing a real journey. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. My last questions are just about the impact of the film. It has become so popular. The Academy loved it. Critics seem to love it. It’s a film with a lot more sex than usual for a film that everybody seems to love. Well, I guess, what do we think about the sort of like, rave reviews? What do we think about the attention that it’s getting now? Do we think it deserves it? Do you think it’s unique to this time? I’m curious what both of you think. Jo, how do you, how do you feel? 

Jo Ellison
I think if you look at this, you know, if you look at the nominees this year, it’s still quite interesting to see that actually, the women in films all still kind of, do conform to quite strange set stereotypes. You know, you’ve got your Barbie, you’ve got your kind of, you know, very, very sanitised, sort of like doll-like woman who kind of represents, clean Hollywood. You’ve got Poor Things. We’ve got this woman who is kind of, you know, the whore, and the kind of, you know, sexual adventurer, very European, very kind of, you know, arty and surrealist, which is whatever it is. You’ve got Killers of the Flower Moon. You’ve got a woman who’s being poisoned by her husband. I mean, in that, in the Bechdel test where they basically, one of the tests that you talk about with a film is of how focused it is on women. It requires women to talk about, you know, to each other for a series of like five minutes where they don’t mention another man. Not many of these films pass the test, sadly. The only one I think that does in the nominees this year is like Nyad. So in terms of the kind of general landscape of women in film, it’s not really kind of, I don’t think it’s like changing the needle. They’re just getting the boobs out more often, which I don’t know. Am I happy about that? I guess I am, kind of, but I’m not. I wouldn’t be thrilled. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
And, Jan, what do you think? You know, you’ve, you and your deputy editor, RAF, like, you have seen, so many seasons of films and covered them. How are you watching this? 

Jan Dalley
I agree with Jo that this one benefited from a lot of extra publicity. I think it benefited hugely from the comparison with Barbie. This provides us with so much more grist to a nice argumentative mill. And people love an argument, you know, it’s just great to be able to really discuss a film like this with so many contrasting and angrily contrasting viewpoints. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Jen and Jo, thank you both so much. We will be back in just a moment for More or Less. 

[SWAMP NOTES AD PLAYING]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
Welcome back for More or Less, the part of the show where we each say one thing we want to see more of, or less of culturally. Jo, what do you have? 

Jo Ellison
OK, more of Harris Dickinson plays. He’s in The Iron Claw at the moment. He’s also in Triangle of Sadness, and he was in another film I watched last week, and he’s unrecognisable in it. Oh, Scrapper. I just . . . I’m in love. I’m obsessed. So, yes. More of him. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Could you say his name again? 

Jo Ellison
Harris Dickinson. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Harris Dickinson. 

Jo Ellison
27-year-old actor. Delicious. And also exceptionally good. He’s a chameleon before the screen. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Jan, what about you? 

Jan Dalley
Well, my More category is probably a little more vague. I would like more chance for artists in all disciplines to experiment. And that probably means more money for the arts, more funding. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Thank you. Jan. I have a very concrete one, which is more concentrated travel reviews, I think. I am planning a trip to Oaxaca for next month, and I went down this rabbit hole recently of trying to figure out where to stay. And there’s just too much. There’s like, hotel booking sites, Airbnb reviews, TripAdvisor reviews, Google. And then there’s of course like the great travel stories in our newspapers. And it just feels very . . . the internet feels very disorganised about this, so I feel that we need help. Fewer travel review sites maybe, more concentrated reviews. And also if listeners have Oaxaca tips, please let me know. Jo and Jan, thank you so much. This was so fun, so thought-provoking. And, please come again. 

Jo Ellison
Thank you very much. 

Jan Dalley
It was a pleasure. Thank you. 

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s the show. Thank you for listening to Life and Art from FT Weekend. Pick a read through the show notes. We have relevant links to everything that we discussed, including the FT’s reviews of Poor Things and discounts for subscription to the Financial Times. We also have ways to stay in touch with me and with the show, whether that is by email, on X or on Instagram. Every link in the show notes that goes to the Financial Times gets you past the paywall.

I’m Lilah Raptopoulos, and here is my incredible team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smith is our producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer and our global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Have a wonderful week and we’ll find each other again on Monday.