yorgos lanthimos my year of rest and relaxation

The rest of it is her instinct, her presence.” On the topic of his actors’ remarkable performances, he is modest – “I don’t do it. We identified the stages she would be in – in terms of how she walks, how she speaks throughout her journey. “I suggested a number of films for her to watch, including Herzog’s Kaspar Hauser and Milos Forman’s The Firemen’s Ball. How did they handle this physical transformation? “Creatively, there’s a synchronicity between us,” Lanthimos says. Not only does she appear in nearly every frame, but she has to transition from infant to critical, thoughtful adult. Her performance is integral to the unity of Poor Things. Almost as soon as Stone heard about the script she stepped on board as a producer. Poor Things is Emma Stone and Lanthimos’s third collaboration, after The Favourite and the short film Bleat in 2022. Poor Things (2023) © Photograph by Yorgos Lanthimos And his timing is impeccable: Barbie has already demonstrated this year that filmgoers will come out in force to watch a naïve young woman discover the real world. Even with this vibrant palette, and using more locations than his previous work, Lanthimos retains his unique sense of claustrophobia. The film maps out Bella’s voyage from isolation to excitement and fun by moving from black and white to bursts of colour.

The doctor’s student Max McCandless (Ramy Youssef) falls in love with Bella, but she abandons him for sexual escapades with the cad Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo). Bella has the body of a woman and the mind of a child – a large part of the comedy comes, as it always does with Lanthimos, from seeing social conventions disrupted. It follows Bella Baxter, a creation of her doctor father Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), as she figures out the idiosyncrasies of the world. Poor Things is based on a 1992 novel by the late Alasdair Gray. It also showed that audiences would follow him, with box-office of close to $100 million on a $15 million budget. The Favourite, a darkly comic story about shame and humiliation, smuggled in under the guise of a period drama, proved Lanthimos a singular filmmaker with an uncompromised vision and won the Grand Jury Prize at Venice, seven Baftas and a slew of Oscar nominations.

However it was The Favourite, his film about ambition, sexual competition and rabbits in Queen Anne’s court, which catapulted him to something like the mainstream in 2019. His English-language debut was 2015’s The Lobster, a satire of our cultural obsession with coupledom. His breakthrough, in 2009, was the Greek drama Dogtooth, an unsettling drama about a family fenced off from the world. Lanthimos has been making strange concoctions for nearly two decades now. ‘Sugar and violence’ is a neat summation of Poor Things – the delectable, near-edible set design Bella’s puffy, girlish costumes the mesmerising dance sequence all of it barely masking the brutality at its centre.

Yorgos lanthimos my year of rest and relaxation