Starring: Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe and Mark Ruffalo
Distributor: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
Runtime: 141 mins. Reviewed in Dec 2023
Reviewer: Peter W Sheehan
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This surrealist, science fiction, fantasy film tells the story of a young Victorian woman who is resurrected from the dead, combing back to life as a young child. She embarks on a journey of liberation where she has to learn now to restructure her life, and how she sees herself.
The film won the Golden Lion Award for Best Film at the 2023 Venice International Film Festival.
Bella Baxter (Stone) commits suicide and is brought back to life by unorthodox scientist, Dr Godwin Baxter (Dafoe), who is her adoptive father. Lanthimos directs this movie, which is from a 1992 novel of the same name by Alasdair Gray. Echoing the theme of the novel on which the film is based, Baxter is a scientist-doctor who performs medical miracles. His greatest achievement is the creation of life. Although Bella suicided, she is reborn, but there is a twist. Baxter brings Bella back to life by transplanting the brain of a foetus that Bella was carrying. A full-grown woman emerges from his operation, but Bella now has an infant’s mind. Being a child reborn, Bella is passionately curious, inquisitive and voracious. She is eager to learn and naively runs off with a debauched lawyer, Duncan Wedderburn (Ruffalo), who cannot handle Bella’s behaviour and the person she has now become.
Freed from past prejudices, Bella pursues experiences that she finds liberating. She has no social constraint, and she behaves in a totally naive, unsophisticated way. In her re-experience of life, newly discovered, and protected by her adoptive father, she has discovered equality and liberation, and is determined that be always so. Reborn as a woman, she sees everything for the first time as a woman with a child’s mind, she has no guilt, shame, and no negative judgment about herself. She has to learn about herself, and to find out who she is, as she grows.
The film is filled with bizarre visual imagery which emphasises the surreal nature of what is occurring. It is a film about morality, sex, gender identity and politics, and its visual imagery is unsettling. Bella is a woman without shame, who pursues sensory stimulation with no awareness of the necessity of restraint. Restraint emerges only when her child’s mind grows to grasp that it is necessary to have it. The film employs fantasy imagery powerfully, and its subject matter is provocative and thought-provoking.
Themovie develops into a director’s meditation on how perceived reality can be manipulated and restructured.
Lanthimos is a distinctive director, and as with his The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), this film is visually striking. It distresses and disturbs. Underneath his imagery, Lanthimos starkly delivers a morality tale about the social necessity for moral restraint. He has a probing eye for fine detail and explores the dividing line between science, the supernatural, and the surreal. This is a film that is highly sophisticated film-making, and Stone makes a disturbing Bella.
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