QCinema 2023 | Poor Things, Perfect Days

 

Yorgos Lanthimos is a pretty funny guy.

Or at least, he's a guy that makes funny films, whose humor stems from either leaning into the absurdity that results from breaking a state of 'normalcy', or from the inherent weirdness of the way things are. In this case, a loose adaptation of Alasdair Gray's 1992 novel, it's a little bit of both.

Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) starts the film as quite the peculiar character. Talking mostly in single words and animal sounds, the new "daughter" of the scientist and anatomist Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) is a bit of an enigma. It turns out that she's the product of the older Baxter's mad scientist experiments: he fished her dead, pregnant corpse near the bridge where she committed suicide, transplanted her still-alive fetus' brain in her head and reanimated her.

The newly reanimated Bella has no conception of "polite society", and navigates it with a naivete not unlike the titular character of Greta Gerwig's Barbie (2023), though this journey takes a much more R-18 (and arguably better) turn. As Bella seeks to whet her ferocious sexual appetites, she meets a number of individuals who seek either to help her or to take advantage of her. Indeed, the film can be seen as how the men (and sometimes women) of that polite society react to such a disruption, and the hilarity that ensues when that woman would go her own way regardless.

As the film goes on, Bella grows (and Emma Stone, in what is perhaps the performance of her career, brings this across beautifully) and she learns, much as you or I would learn, about how the world is not all sunshine and rainbows and even in such a society, there are structures and hierarchies to be followed. Yet, even with that knowledge, is perhaps what's most important: is that Bella makes all of these decisions by her own free will and carves out a space for herself regardless. And if she gets to do whatever she wants and goes wherever she needs to be, whether it be in Greece, France, or back in her home, what's wrong with that? What's funny about that?

Hirayama (Koji Yakusho) cleans toilets for a living. It's not exactly one of the most glamorous jobs out there, as an early interaction with a woman and her child makes it clear. But without fail, he gets up to the sound of a streetsweeper in the morning, goes through the motions of his work, and reads a few pages from a collection of books in the evening. It's a simple life and honest work, and Hirayama likes it that way.

There's something I wrote earlier this year for another (similarly themed) film that I wish to replicate here, because it captures my feelings about Wim Wenders' Perfect Days... perfectly:

There is something incredibly comforting about routine: something safe in ordinariness, in the idea that no matter how drastically our lives may change, we return to familiar motions. It is also through routine and ritual that we observe the ephemera of living (in Japanese - mono no aware), of the impermanence of all things. Routine, thus, is a quiet act of rebellion then, a way of fighting back the chaos of life.

Through (comforting) repetition Wenders shows us the life of a man who has learned not to wander through the chaos of life, but to stand still and behold it - to see wonder in mundane things we'd usually otherwise ignore. With his rickety camera he takes a picture of the same tree almost every day, with the sun filtering through the clouds, with no other purpose than to admire its beauty. Instead of reacting to life, he merely observes and lets things pass him by.

At many points, however, Hirayama comes across several challenges to his chosen way of life. He gets a glimpse of sharing his life with a companion, or a loved one - or at least someone who shares his own desires or tends to his wants and needs. Later on, someone from his past visits him, showing him glimpses of the life he once lived, and the life he could have lived. At certain parts of the film, he catches sight of the same vagrant - someone who perhaps represents the purest form of his way of life, or an inevitable conclusion to a man who has lived invisibly, alone. And finally, he confronts his own mortality, and the notion that at the end of this journey, he will have lived his life with many things undone, with many things unknown.

But Hirayama's response to that succinctly encapsulates his life view: next time is next time. Now is now. If there's something that needs to be known, find out. If there's something that needs to be done, do it. Though it is a film about a man who stands still, it's definitely not about a man who has stopped dreaming. There's something beautiful in that, I think.