Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2023)

[MichaelB]

It’s very rare that my wife and I are on absolutely the same wavelength with a film (our cultural tastes are quite hilariously different most of the time*), but we were with The Favourite and I have every confidence that we will be with this one as well.

(*to underscore this, we recently made independent trips abroad, me to delve into the Krzysztof Kieślowski archives in Poland, she to go to a Harry Styles gig in Italy. Neither of us was the least bit inclined to accompany the other.)

[Never Cursed]

This was enthusiastically received at Venice and is now an unexpected front runner for Oscars, particularly for Stone and Ruffalo, and will likely snatch all the down line awards Barbie had been projected to win. Many called it Lanthimos’ best film as well

The Venice jury agrees! This just won the Golden Lion.

[Rupert Pupkin]

Is there a theatrical release date in France ? will this be available in streaming at the same time than the theatrical release (not sure of that) ?
I just saw the trailer it looks crazier than the Favourite and I have a mega massive crush for Emma Stone since years.

By the way, there has been no UHD release of "The Favourite" ? I remember that at that time it was planned to be released in UHD then forgotten; I bought the US release; wasn't "The Favourite" available in 2160 via WEB release at that time ?
Still no plans for a UHD release of "The Favourite" ?

Another of my favorite is "The Lobster" (no I won't say anything about Rachel Weisz )

[zedz]

I liked this a lot. A scurrilous, stylish feminist satire. Really funny, and every actor aces the very precise tonal range required of them.

[therewillbeblus]

It was predestined for my favorite film of the year to be an Emma Stone-led Road Movie, incorporating all of my personal thematic and pleasure interests and seemingly every genre to boot (there’s even a noir bit at the end) while taking the weirdest possible route to fulfill its life-affirming promise. Poor Things transcends the fairy tale for the modern age, not just through satire but genuine engagement with spiritual, emotional, existential, and psychological evocations from life experience. Stone + Lanthimos 4 lyfe please

[Monterey Jack]

Like a vintage Terry Gilliam movie shot by a Suspiria-era Vittorio Storaro (and art-directed by Wes Anderson), Poor Things is one of the most brashly entertaining films of the year. Every technical credit is polished to a high gloss (those colors...!), and Emma Stone delivers one of her best performances (and some of the best physical acting of the year). It took me a while to warm to Yorgos Lanthimos' style (The Lobster baffled me, and not in a good way, The Killing Of A Sacred Deer didn't quite work, but The Favourite really impressed me), but this plays like the culmination of his eccentric style, and is his best film to date. This ranks very high on my top ten list.

[yoloswegmaster]

35mm prints are going to be screened in Australia, Ireland, and the U.K.

[swo17]

Apparently this film is censored in the UK

SpoilerShow

the scene where a father takes his two sons to watch him be with a prostitute

[therewillbeblus]

That won’t affect how the film plays since its episodically isolated, but it’s a riot

[Yakushima]

Apparently this film is censored in the UK

SpoilerShow

the scene where a father takes his two sons to watch him be with a prostitute

This is so ridiculous, even more so because the above mentioned scene is very similar to the classic sex ed scene in Monty Python's Meaning of Life.

[therewillbeblus]

And no more shocking nor inappropriate than most other scenes in the film

[MichaelB]

And no more shocking nor inappropriate than most other scenes in the film

Aside from the pivotal fact that under-18s are involved, which puts it potentially in breach of the 1978 Protection of Children Act.

Hence the potential legal problem - it’s not down to the BBFC being prudish.

Speaking from experience, the PoCA is very hard to work around because context and artistic merit don’t constitute acceptable legal defences (unlike the 1959 Obscene Publications Act, whose wording helpfully makes it very hard for anything with any artistic merit to be prosecuted).

[Aunt Peg]

According to someone on Blu Ray Forum, Lanthimos made a small change(s) to what was shown at the Venice Film Festival.

That said, what is being screening commercially in the US and Australia does contain the above mentioned scene.

Also, that scene may not be removed for the UK release, just edited differently to reflect the UK law. Until people from different countries can make exact comparisons with each other it remains to be seen what has changed.

[MichaelB]

Yes, I gather the BBFC has been working closely and constructively with Lanthimos over this - they certainly don't want to damage the film, merely to make sure that it doesn't break a law so stringent that even mere possession of offending material is illegal.

I suspect this is why, despite the success of Arrow's Walerian Borowczyk project, they haven't tried to release Immoral Women and Lulu, because they both feature sexualised nudity involving actresses who were under eighteen at the time - perfectly legal in France, perfectly legal even in Britain from 1978-2003 (when the PoCA age limit was raised to eighteen), but decidedly dodgy now. (Equally dodgy are some of the Sun newspaper's most famous Page Three spreads involving the then sixteen-year-old Samantha Fox, which have effectively been criminalised post-2003 - a fact worth bearing in mind whenever the paper gets up on its high horse about paedophiles.)

[reaky]

I don’t understand why Studio Canal have been able to release Hammer’s To the Devil a Daughter on DVD and blu-ray, given that it features full-frontal nudity of the then 14-year-old Nastassja Kinski. There’s no possible defence that it’s non-sexual, since she’s presented to Richard Widmark as temptation, and Christopher Lee is planning to have sex with and impregnate her.

[Never Cursed]

I certainly remember the scene in question from this film's London Film Festival screening, so either parts of the scene were cut without losing the whole and the edit was made a while ago, or the law doesn't require the scene to be cut before the film's rating. Either way, I can't imagine this particular edit is all that transformative (and surely for a film of this importance a shot-by-shot comparison will be available as soon as the movie is streaming in the UK)

[Mr Sausage]

I don’t wonder if the problem with the scene in question is that, if memory serves, the kids are in the same shot as a sexual act, which I think is where the law applies.

Good question about To the Devil a Daughter. Maybe because, while there are sexual overtones to it in the context of the story, Kinski is still doing nothing more than walking towards the camera, and not in a particularly sexual or tempting manner. That’s my best guess anyway.

[MichaelB]

Yes, the law only kicks in if actual sexual activity is clearly taking place in the same shot. Straightforward nudity on its own isn’t in the same category, and in any case Europeans (and Australians, come to that) are a lot less prudish than Americans on that score. See also Walkabout, of course.

When I watched A Serbian Film, I was very struck by the way that the film almost went out of its way to emphasise that children weren’t in the same shot as the acts that they were apparently witnessing. You could of course easily fake this with CGI, but they clearly consciously decided not to go down that route, to make it obvious if you went through the contentious scenes shot by shot how the fakery was achieved.

[Guido]

FWIW, I saw this in Telluride and it was obvious in that cut that the children were never physically in the same shot as Stone and the father as everything unfolds.

[Calvin]

The scene was definitely still present when it was screened at the Belfast Film Festival a couple of months ago

[furbicide]

And no more shocking nor inappropriate than most other scenes in the film

Aside from the pivotal fact that under-18s are involved, which puts it potentially in breach of the 1978 Protection of Children Act.

Hence the potential legal problem - it’s not down to the BBFC being prudish.

Speaking from experience, the PoCA is very hard to work around because context and artistic merit don’t constitute acceptable legal defences (unlike the 1959 Obscene Publications Act, whose wording helpfully makes it very hard for anything with any artistic merit to be prosecuted).

But it's still puzzling because there's no reason to think that the actors themselves were present ... so all we're left with is the purely fictional scenario, and surely the Protection of Children Act is not so draconian as to proscribe fictional suggestions of children being subjected to harm.

I'd appreciation if someone could explain which part of the act has been invoked here, as there seem to be any number of precedents to suggest that someone at the BBFC has interpreted the law in an extremely over-cautious way in this case. As a random counterpoint, Marielle Heller's The Diary of a Teenage Girl (given an 18 classification by the BBFC and released uncut in 2015) has scenes – as I recall, no less explicit than any of the actual sex scenes in Poor Things – featuring its 15-year-old protagonist (played by an older actor) being statutorily raped by her mother's boyfriend. And there are of course any number of films with fictional children being subjected to violence or killed on screen.

I'm well aware of the BBFC's strident insistence, following the law of the land, on cutting scenes of animal cruelty from films made in prior decades – I don't particularly like that and would far prefer such laws be applied to future production than retrospectively to censor existing works, but at least in that case one can justifiably say that real-life animal cruelty has occurred and been filmed. The same principle might be invoked for on-screen representations of children that we would today deem unsafe and unethical (for instance, the notorious scene in Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song). But I don't understand at all how Poor Things fits into the same category, even as an edge case.

[Calvin]

I'm well aware of the BBFC's strident insistence, following the law of the land, on cutting scenes of animal cruelty from films made in prior decades – I don't particularly like that and would far prefer such laws be applied to future production than retrospectively to censor existing works, but at least in that case one can justifiably say that real-life animal cruelty has occurred and been filmed. The same principle might be invoked for on-screen representations of children that we would today deem unsafe and unethical (for instance, the notorious scene in Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song). But I don't understand at all how Poor Things fits into the same category, even as an edge case.

Though considering the animal cruelty cuts are mandated by a 1927 law, there's very few productions to which they've been applied retrospectively!

[Monterey Jack]

Apparently this film is censored in the UK

SpoilerShow

the scene where a father takes his two sons to watch him be with a prostitute

This is so ridiculous, even more so because the above mentioned scene is very similar to the classic sex ed scene in Monty Python's Meaning of Life.

Is this surprising from the same country that left all of the machine gun violence in The Matrix intact, but edited out a couple of headbutts during the fight scenes?

[MichaelB]

Is this surprising from the same country that left all of the machine gun violence in The Matrix intact, but edited out a couple of headbutts during the fight scenes?

Your example is (or was, as it's nearly 25 years old) an internal BBFC policy, whereas the thing about animal cruelty and sexual activity involving children (or what legally counts as recordings of the real thing) is that they're explicitly proscribed by the criminal law, so the BBFC's hands are tied.

I haven't seen Poor Things yet, and obviously haven't seen the original version of the scene under discussion, but from my own dealings with the BBFC over the last three and a half decades I can confirm first-hand that they're extremely reluctant to cut such material from a film with obvious artistic merit unless they genuinely feel that the shot may breach the law. And they've reached some surprisingly lenient decisions in the past - for instance, when Ai no corrida was shown on the club circuit in the 1980s, projectionists were advised to discreetly cut a reel short, before a shot of what might well constitute a recording of actual child sexual abuse (the shot in question having strategically been left at the very end of the reel). When the BBFC first passed the film in 1991, they had the shot optically cropped, but in the last 10-15 years they've waved it through intact; I genuinely have no idea why, as the legal issues would appear to be identical.

So there must be something specific about that scene in Poor Things that they felt might invoke the PoCA.

Incidentally, their position when it comes to complying with the 1937 [sic] Cinematograph Films (Animals) Act and the 1978 Protection of Children Act is not remotely based on "strident insistence" - they usually don't want to cut this material, and indeed in recent years they've visibly bent over backwards to find loopholes. For instance, their current interpretation of the Animals Act is that they think that clean kills are OK, which is what allowed Cannibal Holocaust to be passed mostly uncut aside from the scene with the coatimundi (there's no animal cruelty legislation in existence that would fail to proscribe that shot!), and they didn't probe too hard with regard to The Stranglers of Bombay; they were satisfied that Hammer themselves hadn't filmed the snake/mongoose fight (the entire quality of the image visibly changes for just those shots), but didn't ask for proof that the Indian documentary-maker who actually filmed it hadn't staged it deliberately for the camera - which is just as well, because such proof would have most likely been impossible to produce.

But the PoCA doesn't have loopholes in the same way, which has caused all sorts of legal kerfuffles elsewhere. For instance, the original legislators in 1978 would never have imagined in their wildest dreams that children would manufacture child porn of themselves - but if a, say, a seventeen-year-old sends a dick pic selfie, that would indeed legally count as "producing and distributing child pornography", with a prison sentence to match. Although in such cases the police are understandably reluctant to bring a prosecution if that's all that it is.

[Guido]

The scene was definitely still present when it was screened at the Belfast Film Festival a couple of months ago

The question at this point isn't whether or not the scene itself was cut, but how it's been altered from some original version that — as far as I can tell — maybe screened once? Venice?

But it's still puzzling because there's no reason to think that the actors themselves were present ... so all we're left with is the purely fictional scenario, and surely the Protection of Children Act is not so draconian as to proscribe fictional suggestions of children being subjected to harm.

Exactly. From an admittedly questionable source in a reddit thread that may or may not have kicked this whole thing off:

i work adjacent to the production company and can shed some light on this: it’s my understanding that in the earlier cut, the two shots were edited to be in frame at the same time (ie. the children and the sex both on screen) and in the recut the film cuts between the two shots so that the children and the sex are never on screen at the same time, but the scene itself remained in the film.