“Poor Creatures” directed by Yorgos Lanthimos with Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe

Yorgos Lanthimos signs a brilliant re-reading of the gothic tale, brilliant and feminist. Crazy and constantly inventive, this is a film that brings joy.

Respect tradition with a very personal visual madness and a near-modern message Barbie : Here’s Yorgos Lanthimos’ winning bet, a perfect cocktail at the start of the year, mixing pee-poo humor with dual architectural, narrative and pictorial gestures, a learning novel divided into chapters and evolving into a completely reinvented universe, the end of our dear old world, the telescope. has literally been checked by

Bella Baxter is played by a feisty and feisty Emma Stone, who dares everything to make her character’s evolution believable and dynamic. At first, we fear the worst a bit because everything is so low, even though the visual effects gauge – sleeve effects – is at its maximum. But the film’s strength lies precisely in its absolute confidence in itself, in a gestural dignity that reminds us of the first Caro and Jeunet. The director has a surprising renunciation of any kind of brutality, a willingness to put himself on the side of the weakest – even the mad scientist, played by Willem Dafoe, who we have rarely seen so tender, is touchingly damaged by cracks. Patriarchal brutality – and their light. And that comes from all the layers of this wedding cake, more baroque than gothic.

Each chapter narrates the liberation of Bella, who travels around the world as her own story, in a reflexive movement that means she is already fully liberated by becoming her own object and means of study. In this, it differs radically from the myth of the creature, Mako reconciles the id and the superego in psychoanalysis, the comic offspring of patriarchy constantly reduced to the status of vaudeville caricatures, while the perverted man triumphs. setting.