Some Poor Things, and a Stalker

Ooooohhh boy! Nearly didn’t make the posting deadline this week, because like a totally reasonable person I decided that for my first real post I’d tackle two very long (2 hrs 22 mins and 2 hrs 41 mins, respectively), very confusing, ultimately pretty exhausting films in a couple of days, which went as well as you’d imagine. My brain is a fine mist right now.

I’m also wondering about this format. The initial idea was I could bounce between the old and new, compare and contrast to find some interesting lessons, but I’m not sure if I wouldn’t rather just do individual single-film write-ups twice a week rather than a shared one every Friday. Let’s have a bash at this format for January and see how we feel about it, eh?

Also, I’m aware of the big blocks of writing, feels like something I need to address but I don’t know, maybe it’s okay? If you have feelings about it, let me know.

Son anyway, I watched Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things and Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 philosophical sci-fi Stalker. Yeah, it was a weird week. I know we discussed the spoilers thing last week, but Poor Things is, like, NEW new, so this one time here’s a spoiler-minimal precis of my feelings on each film:

Poor Things is one of the best-looking films in years, I want to get in and swim in its visuals; found the score a little distracting but very enjoyable, performances across the board were great, especially Mark Ruffalo, first half was really interesting then it got a bit self-indulgent and a lot of the messaging (intended or not) in the second half left me flat. Solid, but I think the hype for the filmmaking quality is overwhelming the fact that it’s philosophically thinner than a lot of Lanthimos’ previous work.

Stalker was an unbelievable experience. There’s something hypnotic about it, with its long, lingering takes and passages of silence and diversions into actual spoken philosophy that kind of captured me. I actually felt the time less in this than I did in Poor Things (that I was sat in a comfier chair while watching it helps a lot). It felt very much like a precursor to Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, and I wonder if Glazer drew inspiration from it in some way. And I loved the philosophical puzzle it presented, like an abstract painting or tone poem, demanding the viewer make their own meaning. In a strange way it might’ve become one of my favourite films.

Actually, maybe I like that little blurb up-top…should I keep it? We’re figuring this out as we go guys, I cannot overemphasize how much I DO NOT know what I’m doing.

Okay, into a little more depth. I’m going to try not to discuss the themes of Poor Things, particularly the feminist ones, because I have a lot of thoughts, many of which are critical, and I just don’t want to turn this into a whole screed about male filmmakers and their crap takes on women. We’re here to be positive, guys!

That unpleasantness aside, I picked well in as much as these are two movies that present us with physical journeys through strange worlds that are, in fact, representative of psychological journeys the characters are taking. In Poor Things, Bella, a woman with a child-like mind (no need to get into why) runs away from a life of captivity with a charismatic but irresponsible rogue to explore the world. In many ways, what we’re seeing in Bella is the process of growing up. At first, she’s confined to her own home by a parental figure, ostensibly for her own safety, and can only define herself in comparison to that figure – this is early childhood.

The escape is adolescence, at which time she attains the capacity to see more of the world, and during which aspects of her innocence are lost either willingly (exploring sex) or are ripped away from her (discovering neglect and inhumanity). Through these trials, and by engaging with new peers (Harry, Tionette) and

mentor figures outside the parent (Martha, and I guess Madame Swiney), she gathers a multitude of different perspectives into one more or less functional adult person, which is what eventually returns to London.

By comparison, Stalker presents a different kind of self-discovery. Or I think it does, I mean who knows, smarter people than me have tried and seemingly failed to figure out what it means. The film follows three men: a Writer, a Professor (we don’t know of what, though we gather he’s likely some manner of scientist), and their guide, known as a Stalker, as they traverse a mysterious area known as the Zone, looking for another mysterious region within known as the Room, entering which is said to grant one their innermost desires.

The physical journey mirrors a phycological one as the Zone strips the Writer and Professor of their defences, breaks down their egos, and leaves them with only raw humanity. Spoiler alert, they never actually enter the Room. On the brink, both Professor and Writer cannot bring themselves to follow through, and the three men arrive back having seemingly wasted their journey. The film certainly presents this as a failure, one inherent to everyone in an increasingly intellectualist and secular society (which late Soviet Russia was): the inability to take a leap of faith, be it in a mysterious higher power, or the word of one’s fellow man.

But I took a different path. I don’t think there is a Room, I think on any given journey, the Room is wherever the party ends up when the Stalker’s clients break down, and rather than reward them with their innermost desires, the process of the journey allows them to see beyond themselves and gain clarity and contentment. In this case, the Writer, a profound intellectual snob and sneering cynic, finds empathy and a human connection he’s lost since being engrossed in his literati bubble; the Professor, who enters overwhelmed by distrust and fear, finds worth in the hope for betterment the Room represents, even if he seemingly cannot attain it himself. Both men leave having found exactly the cure for their problems. It’s like the man said, “you can’t always get what you want. But if you try, sometimes you get what you need.” Never mind your Laozi and Aristotle, we got where we needed with a little Jagger!

The tragedy of it is that the Stalkers (we learn that ours is one of at least a few who do this) never experience the Room. We’re told they’re not allowed to, but I suggest they cannot because in some way, it is them. In both the Writer’s and Professor’s cases, it’s the Stalker’s deteriorating emotional state that brings out their humanity. He’s compelled to keep returning to the Zone, stuck in a kind of Sisyphean agony of putting his life in danger over and over to find a goal he can never attain, and as he breaks down (which, I contend, happens every single time), his clients are forced to find a better version of themselves not for their own sake, but for his. His misery is the prism through which they see the light of their better selves (can I get away with calling that a Dark Side of the Moon reference? I’d quite like to).

Speaking of monochrome becoming many colours, I loved both films’ use of colour. Poor Things presents Bella’s initial world as grey and sterile, then she reaches Lisbon and her world explodes with colour as she goes on her journey of discovery. In a similar but more extreme way, the world outside the Zone in Stalker is rendered in a harsh yellow sepia tone, rendering everything drab and flat, while the interior of the Zone is rendered in full colour, taking advantage of the lush exterior greenery and it’s contrast with the red and brown rust of rotting industrial remains. It speaks of the importance of the journey: the external, our outer selves, isn’t what matters in life, but our inner selves, the journeys of self-discovery and self-examination we take that make us who we are and which allow us to better ourselves and maybe bring change to the world – there’s a touch I especially like in which the only shots we see in colour outside the Zone are of the Stalker’s daughter, suggesting that even if he cannot experience the gift of the Room, he has, in some way, passed it on to her.

Another thing both films did that I love is lean into their sense of artifice. So many movies, in fact whole cinematic movements, have been about verité; about trying to capture reality on film. But both Tarkovsky and Lanthimos absolutely revel in doing the opposite: using film fakeness to mirror the contrivance of the world we create for ourselves. Poor Things has a lot of a Terry Gilliam or Jean-Pierre Jeunet in it: the construction of a whole world in highly stylised, fabricated sets, and also the use of non-traditional cinematography to distance us from the world (in this case what I would describe as a frankly aggressive use of a fish-eye lens).

Stalker’s unreality is less visual and more performative; it put me in mind of Michel Gondry or Charlie Kaufman, where the characters feel almost like performers on a stage, delivering lines to a packed theatre rather than to each other. It gave me such a sense of these being inner monologues rather than speeches that I almost wondered if the whole journey hadn’t taken place at all, that it had all been a visualisation of the journey three men took while discussing their feelings over a few beers in the bar that marks the starting point of the journey.

I’d love to use that kind of unreality in a film, though I don’t know if I’d be brave enough. My creative voice (yeah, I just used the phrase “creative voice”, and you thought I was being pretentious when I was talking about journeys through human consciousness) has really focused in the last couple of years. As I think about the stories I want to tell, what I realise is that they’re stories that take regular human emotions and experiences to extreme places to make it easier, or at least more interesting, to confront them. And that’s certainly something Poor Things is doing, I don’t always like what it ends up saying with that device, but I can’t deny it does so successfully, and I think a huge part of that is the visual language.

I think equally brave would be to do editing like Tarkovsky and Lyudmila Feiginova (the actual editor) do editing, with these long, sustained shots that allow action to play out both on and off-screen, that you time for your eye to take in the entirety of the world and be drawn naturally in different directions. I kind of hate this frantic, show-the-audience-every-single-thing-all-the-time editing of modern films, which I think mostly comes from filmmakers (maybe studios?) not trusting the audience to stay engaged without constant stimulation, or understand without being shown everything. Very infrequently is that kind of frenetic editing actually used for artistic effect – Mad Max: Fury Road and Everything Everywhere All At Once come to mind. Actually, I feel like some of the best movies of the last few years are ones that have embraced this slowness: Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland and Celine Song’s Past Lives (maybe my favourite film of last year? Definitely top three) are two examples.

I don’t know if you could do both…would that be too jarring? As a pure experiment it could be interesting…But the point is in both movies there’s some really brilliant use of style to enhance storytelling in a way I think is kind of rare that I really vibed with.