Tag: Emma Stone

Unfortunately, the film is not as good as its costume design and its production design! Comedy it is not, as it has just one witty one-liner: the prostitutes going to a socialist meeting remarking that “they own their own means of production.” This director is entirely lacking a sense of humor, unless you consider humorous some CGI images of pig-birds, or a scientist slicing brains…

The rest is at times confusing and at times very flat and didactical one-dimensional allegory of a woman’s “story of liberation.” And no, Mr. Lanthimos, the clitoris is not the fountain of a woman’s power or freedom or whatever it is you want us to believe it is. Things are a little more complicated than that…Even as an allegory, the film does not make much sense or impress as an original or cogent conceptual piece. A sort of a “Frankenstein” woman, gets her unborn child’s brain implanted in her own head. She is robot-like and “soul-less”, she “discovers” sex and pleasure in an appropriately robot-like and soul-less way, then she discovers social injustice, but then this story-line is not taken any further as a philosopher (of sorts) tells her that there is no way of making the world a better place. Regardless, she tries to improve the world by becoming a prostitute, and then after being claimed by her former husband who caused her death returns to him only to discover (again) that she is free and can kill him. Finally, the heroine finds solace in science?! The key allegorical figures – the father, the lover, the husband, and the nice guy – are made up of banalities and utter banalities to the most boring effect. Emma Stone definitely has better roles. I felt sorry for her being limited to performing so “physical” a role — playing a brainless robot in the first half of the movie and during one third of the film being engaged in graphic sexual scenes. Talk about women’s liberation! This is the deepest irony of the film. The director’s obsession with sex has been demonstrated time and time again in his previous films- and it does not go beyond that, a mere obsession, because the representation of sex in his films does not transcend anything or explain, or enlighten, or analyze… It is disturbing because it is too literal. I wonder how he is getting away with this. There is no lack of snobs in the audience and the industry, I suppose…

And a wonderful actor like Mark Ruffalo, has to play this ridiculous character, a simplistic puppet — that is almost a cinematic crime perpetrated by Mr. Lanthimos. But he has done it before — to Olivia Coleman and others…