Some films tell stories in so many dimensions that they merit multiple viewings, just to absorb it all. “Poor Things,” the fantasia from director Yorgos Lanthimos, is one of those.
The film, releasing this week, is a feminist Frankenstein tale that features Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) as a woman reanimated by the freakishly scarred and twisted Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) and her journey of discovery as she literally starts life over again.
London-based costume designer Holly Waddington partnered with production designer and costume consultant Shona Heath to build layers of meaning into every surface. The visual expedition begins with the opening credits, which focus on charmingly quilted satin walls that invoke a nursery crossed with a padded cell. Next, we see a woman in a sapphire dress with sleeves like an armadillo crossed with some sort of aquatic creature. A new scene opens on a translucent blob with twisty veins that seems to throb, which is revealed to be a portion of a voluminous, sheer sleeve.
Premiering at Venice and Telluride, Yorgos Lanthimos’ ‘Poor Things’ and Pablo Larraín’s ‘El Conde’ find their filmmakers revisiting old terrain with rewarding results.
The Searchlight Pictures film was adapted by Tony McNamara from the novel by Alasdair Gray. Waddington came to the production via Hulu’s “The Great,” where she worked with series creator McNamara, who proposed that she meet Lanthimos, who also directed Stone in “The Favourite.”
The team alchemy cooked up a free-flowing river of symbolism and fantasy that builds an arresting world.
Lanthimos urged Waddington to let her imagination run, telling her, “ Take the material and come up with things and just go for it.’ I think that is a brave and bold thing to do with people you have never worked with before,” she says of the director.
The story draws from the Victorian era, but Waddington liberally distorts the boundaries.
“I just knew he wouldn’t want it to be a period drama, or obviously sci-fi, or obviously fashion. It had to have an in-between, hard-to-place, inexplicable quality,” Waddington says.
She and Heath worked through pandemic restrictions apart and then together before Waddington’s team departed to Budapest to shoot and manufacture costumes.
Costumes exhibit
The ASU FIDM Museum is presenting an exhibit of costumes from the Yorgos Lanthimos film “Poor Things” Monday-Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., through Dec. 15. The museum is at 919 S. Grand Ave., Los Angeles. Admission is free.
“It was a really wonderful thing to be collaborating with her,” Waddington says of Heath. “She is a very unusual mind. She does nothing predictable.” Heath has lent her signature, surreal style across many creative fields, including fashion, photography and interior design.
The duo pored over imagery from fashion, art and science and looked at seashells, the insides of animals and body parts. Just as Dr. Baxter reassembles humans and other living things, so, too, did Heath’s production design and Waddington’s costumes: A window evokes a penis, and a collar resembles a wing or ruff.
“Lots of them were references to female body parts,” Waddington says of her costumes. “I remember bringing Emma to the set, and Yorgos looked at me and said in a sort of deadpan voice, ‘It’s a vagina blouse.’ And it was, but not slavishly, just subtly. That is what was going on in my mind.”
The idea of manipulated flesh also is reflected in the pinky skin tones and clothing surfaces and silhouettes that recall body parts, which Waddington cleverly exploited for Bella.
“I had this fabric that was almost like the texture of an intestine or a lung ... and it’s kind of breathing,” she says. “Victorian clothes are about controlling the body and forcing it into a specific shape. This is a contradiction. She doesn’t wear a corset in her wardrobe ever.”
Clothes are sometimes less a second skin and more an external appendage, an idea that’s reflected in the many costumes with dimensional fabrics, sharp pleats, quilting, ruffles and gathers that seem to move independently of the body.
“Texture was a big thing for me, organic textures, and the textures of organs,” Waddington notes.
That line of thinking led her to replace typical Victorian trims such as jet beading and lace with her versions that, she says, “were evocative of living forms to show how [Bella] is unruly, uncontainable, a living creation.”
Waddington’s costumes trace Bella’s development from infantile child to rebellious adolescent to mature woman. As a child, she twirls minus her skirt in a floor-length padded underpinning that resembles a lobster tail.
“That’s what children are like — they are very quickly disheveled and unraveled,” Waddington says. Bella’s state of undress is a recurring theme that also telegraphs that she doesn’t always abide by society’s rules.
When Bella runs off with debauched attorney Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) for a continent-hopping adventure, she is more grown up but still wanders city streets in a jacket and silky shorts, which were essentially underwear.
“She hasn’t had the life or brainwashing or learning to know that you put your skirt with your Victorian jacket and a belt and a brooch,” Waddington says.
‘Poor Things,’ a collaboration between director Yorgos Lanthimos and actor Emma Stone, has won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.
Her frequently missing wardrobe pieces are also a symbol of her growing liberation.
“In Paris, when she becomes a student and she finally knows she wants to become a doctor, she has gotten herself a proper black wool suit with shirt and tie that is quite masculine,” Waddington notes. But, ever the original, Bella skips the required full-length stockings.
Bella becomes a symbol of self-determination in the end. What is she wearing? A soft sweater and a long, divided skirt of the kind that allowed women beginning in the 1890s to ride bicycles, an act that represented women’s emancipation. Waddington helps give us a sense that this beautiful science experiment is becoming fully realized, on her own terms.
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