Repost: Poor Things

Not the film, just my family

For the 5-6 of you kind people who regularly read these essays (Hi Mom), sorry, but instead of a new piece in this issue, I am reposting an edited version of an older piece from March last year. It’s about watching the film Poor Things with my family. If you haven’t read it before, I hope you enjoy it. (Okay Mom, can you please stop reading now?)

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If you are here for a review of the film Poor Things, you’ve come to the wrong place. If you are here for a review of my family’s horrifying experience watching Poor Things together, Welcome!

I am a fan of Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite. (And even though no one has ever asked, I was rooting for it to win the Oscar for Best Picture in 2019.) Ever since I watched it, I had been on the lookout for his next film. A few years later the same team – director Yorgos Lanthimos, writer Tony McNamara and actress Emma Stone – reunited to make Poor Things.

Soon after it released in theatres, and was nominated for eleven Oscars, I was in Toronto to see my parents and sister. Watching it was high on the agenda.

I’m not the Oscar fanatic I once was - my sleep now more important than the start of the red carpet - but I still try to watch as many Best Picture nominees as reasonably possible, and then pick my horse.

My parents had liked The Favourite too, and with Poor Things, it seemed like Lanthimos was doing his thing, in his style, except better. I was sure I would love it, and by extension, assumed they would, too. They hadn’t heard of it but they do watch the odd film, and were capable of buying tickets to this one just by chance. Before I flew to Toronto, I called them especially to say they were not to watch it. They were to wait until I got there so it could be a wholesome family experience.

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Mom thinks of herself as a cinema purist and considers it beneath her to watch trailers. She does not want anything - no glimpse of plot or aesthetic - to corrupt her movie watching experience. “If it was up to me, I wouldn’t even know the name. I would go in fully blind.” She may as well. She usually needs her sleep apnea machine before half an hour is up. Dad has no principled objection to trailers but does not watch them, choosing to delegate such menial due diligence to his three personal secretaries. My sister is another story altogether. Pooja gave up watching films and shows many years ago, now rarely being found near a screen. We don’t know why. And we don’t want to get bitten, so we don’t ask. But she’s a lost, dreamy soul and this seemed like a film she might make an exception for, what with all my insistence. As a result, this elaborate Saturday afternoon enterprise was entirely my brainchild.

Since it was rated R, I did a quick appropriateness check before booking tickets. We were not the kind of family that could watch anything remotely ‘adult’ together. If a character from Friends said something sexual in passing, we would become tense, pretend like none of us had understood the reference, and look for a way to leave the room. My mother, seasoned player, would just walk out and start making cold coffee for everyone.

I wanted to know if Poor Things was a cold coffee kind of film, graphic enough for us to change plans. My search for “Does Poor Things have nudity?” led me to an article which seemed helpful, but had a “SPOILERS AHEAD” warning early on. I’m not particular like my mother, I do not stick my fingers in my ears and run out of the room singing songs at the top of my voice, when someone starts talking about the cast of a film, but I will heed a “SPOILERS AHEAD” sign just as I would a “DANGER AHEAD” sign. I stopped reading and called a friend who had watched it instead.

“Listen, I’m thinking I’ll go watch Poor Things with the parents and Pooja. Is it very graphic though – is there a lot of sex and nudity?”

“Little bit. Not much. You could watch it with it with them.”

How comforting to hear such a quick and unambiguous response.

Dad was grateful for the opportunity to design a detailed itinerary: exact time of departure, ideal route with the least traffic, the optimal four seats in the theatre. They were surprised to see both their moody children willingly participate, and booked tickets in one of those fancy halls which have armchairs for seats - Dad and Pooja at the outer ends, Mom and I sandwiched in the middle (separated by our large, individual arm-rests and cup holders).

It started out in that classic, intriguing Yorgos Lanthimos way, and all of us were keen to love it. (I should warn you - there are a few minor plot spoilers ahead).

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I did not expect to see a penis at all, but certainly not on a corpse, or in the first eight minutes. Thanks to this initial shock, I was less surprised to see the first vagina (also on a corpse) a few minutes later. Then began the nudity of people who were alive. Followed by masturbation. So much masturbation. Screams of loud, prolonged orgasms filled Bella Baxter’s house - in bed, at the breakfast table, with the aid of apples.

Without saying anything, my mother and I both moved our hands up to our respective temples, ostensibly so our faces could rest on our palms, but really as a shield, a curtain that would keep us from making accidental eye contact.

Although we had strictly avoided family viewing of this kind in the past, we were all fully grown adults. Even I, the youngest, was 36. And I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was less awkward than expected. I remembered my friend’s promise of the explicit material being brief and tolerable, and given all that we had witnessed in forty minutes, I was sure it was almost over. The plot would soon shift focus from the adolescent self-exploration of one’s body to other elements of young Bella’s life.

That’s when the intercourse began. Duncan Wedderburn and Bella Baxter tried out several different positions in what she called “furious jumping”. My hand became stiff against my face to make sure there was no gap between my fingers. I wouldn’t dare turn towards my mother, but could tell she was doing the same thing. About a third of the way in, this family of four was totally numb to the recurring presence of breasts on screen. I suspect we were all saying the same prayer: let the boobs be a permanent fixture so long as nobody fucks.

The filmmakers then gave us a longish break to take bites from each other’s popcorn. For a while, we watched together. The curtain came down. We let ourselves relax. Then, with an hour still to go, Bella Baxter found herself in Paris and joined a brothel. Long scenes of intercourse became as commonplace as masturbation once was, the sex accompanied by a score that sounded like techno by an orchestra. Multiple penises had made an appearance and while there may be nothing inherently wrong with this, it’s a measure of just how terrible a choice of film it was for our collective viewing.

I could hardly believe it when a man walked into the brothel with his two sons to impart a lesson in sex education. Bella and her client then demonstrated for the benefit of the young boys the different stages of foreplay and sex. She said to them, “to aid things along, a finger in the arse or a slight choking may do it.” I did not imagine that I would one day be sitting beside my mother watching a film, hear a character deliver the line, “finger in the arse”, and mean it literally.

The final dose is a forty-five second sequence of a woman’s face buried between Bella’s legs. Forty-five seconds isn’t very long but it’s a lifetime when you’re watching porn with your mom.

I could hear her making disapproving noises and sighing in extreme displeasure. She felt trapped, with no escape to a cold coffee station. All Pooja did through this 140-minute ordeal was sip her giant margarita and get progressively less perturbed by it all. Dad watched clinically, sometimes sniggering to himself in the corner. He was partly pleased at the good fortune of his seat, partly amused at the misfortune of my mother’s. Dad and Pooja made the right calls, sitting next to strangers on at least one side. They just leaned further and further away from us when things got weird.

I suppose the film is original and puzzling and has some great performances, but how’s the dialogue, the cinematography, the comic timing, what’s it really about? I’m afraid I cannot, in good faith, comment on the quality of its cinematic elements. I wasn’t really watching. My attention was focused on making sure the iron curtain stayed in place.

Once outside, we looked around waiting for someone to say something. “What did you all think?”, Mom started us off like this was one of her seminars. “I liked that it was different from other movies”, slurred Pooja, the person who watches one film a year and has no sense of a baseline. “Incredible!”, I declared.

It’s not that I believed something different and was actively lying; my brain had no choice but to convince me of this in the moment, a mix of Stockholm syndrome from the film and my desperation to justify our misadventure. (My admiration for the film has dampened considerably since.)

When we got home, I went up to my room, opened my phone and started typing a message:

“DUDE. IN WHAT WORLD…”