MOVIE MUSIC UK

Original Review by Jonathan Broxton

The latest film from the unconventional cinematic mind of director Yorgos Lanthimos is Poor Things, which if you were to distill it down to its core could be best described as a feminist take on the Frankenstein story. The film is set in Victorian London and stars Emma Stone as Bella Baxter, a child-like young woman in the care of Godwin Baxter, an eminent surgeon with horrific facial scars (played by Willem Defoe, doing an excellent Edinburgh accent). It is revealed to Godwin’s student Max McCandles (Rami Youssef) that Bella is actually a resurrected suicide victim whom Godwin revived by transplanting her brain with that of her unborn child, resulting in her literally being a baby in a woman’s body. Initially Godwin and McCandles teach Bella as one would an infant, and McCandles falls in love with her and asks for her hand in marriage; however, as Bella matures, she starts to desire more freedom, and eventually leaves on a grand tour of Europe with Godwin’s lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo). This leads Bella on a journey of philosophical and sexual self-discovery – a journey which is interrupted when her past begins to catch up with her.

The movie is fascinating on several levels. Emma Stone’s performance as Bella is raw and honest and unflinching, whether she is having a tantrum during her child phase, or embarking on a series of unfiltered sexual encounters during her early adult phase. She is committed to the role entirely, embodying every stage of human development, mentally and physically, and is absolutely brilliant. Meanwhile, the men around her represent avatars of all the different ways men oppress women, whether they mean to or not – Willem Dafoe’s smothering father figure, Rami Youssef’s doe-eyed innocent, Mark Ruffalo’s exciting cavalier who is obsessed with her but then begins to hate her when she starts expressing her agency and having ideas of her own, Jerrod Carmichael as a nihilist who tries to undermine her altruism and positivity, Christopher Abbott as the embodiment of cruelty. Seeing all these societal and social pressures applied to Bella, one after the other, really illustrates just how many conflicting expectations women have thrust upon them, and it’s interesting how two of the most acclaimed films of the year – this one, and Barbie – express similar sentiments, albeit in very different ways.

Visually, Poor Things is astonishing too, with a fantastic production design aesthetic that takes its inspiration from a variety of sources, including German Expressionism, and embraces surrealism and intentional avant-garde staginess. The color palette becomes bolder and more vibrant as Bella’s own life experiences expand, and the costume design ideas similarly mirror Bella’s life, moving from childlike get-ups with puffy sleeves, through an array of weirdly mismatched accessories as she ‘finds herself,’ to her more formal and sensible choices at the end. The cinematography, by Irish DP Robbie Ryan, uses the same wildly eclectic camera angles as he did on Yanthimos’s The Favorite – he has a special love of fish eye lenses – which makes the whole thing feel just a little off-kilter.

Poor Things is interesting from a musical point of view, as it marks the first time Lanthimos has commissioned an original score for any of his films. Of course, Lanthimos couldn’t be expected to do anything conventionally, and so the score is by English composer, musician, and producer Joscelin Dent-Pooley, who records under the stage name Jerskin Fendrix. Poor Things is his film debut, but he is no amateur; after graduating from Cambridge University he staged a post-modern opera at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and then got involved in the local art-pop scene. He released his own debut album Winterreise in 2020 – a sort of mix of punk rock and hip-hop, Bach and Schubert – and it was that album that brought him to Lanthimos’s attention.

To say that Fendrix’s score is strange is an understatement of the highest order, and it’s actually a perfect score to illustrate the difference between a score in context and a score as its own listening experience, because the difference is stark. As an album of music to listen to, it’s often a deeply frustrating and sometimes unpleasant experience. Those who know my taste will know immediately upon hearing it that Poor Things does not fit my aesthetic in the slightest – it’s a bizarre, disjointed, almost aggressively abstract work, a collision of out-of-tune strings, odd scraping noises, little piano textures, and breathy non-musical sounds played through organs and bagpipes. But, when you experience the score in context, it’s immediately apparent what Lanthimos and Fendrix are doing: the score is an almost literal depiction of Bella’s mind, her emotions, and the way her synapses are firing at any given point in the film.

When Bella is a baby, nothing works. In the same way that she has no control over her voice, her gait, her bladder, the music in the first third of the film sounds broken, wrong, out-of-tune, as if the musicians have no control over the instruments they are playing. Then, as Bella starts to develop, the music mirrors the uncontrolled and sometimes conflicting emotions that toddlers and children have; it’s chaotic, sometimes angry, sometimes sad, sometimes curious, sometimes happy, sometimes all of those things all at the same time. And then as Bella starts to reach maturity and adulthood the music begins to coalesce into something more ‘normal,’ with instruments that now play in tune and have a more clearly defined sound, before it all comes together in the almost fully consonant, almost symphonic end titles. Throughout all this there are several recurring themes, including one for Bella herself, a whimsical motif that goes through a number of different guises, again mirroring the many emotional states and physical experiences the character encounters.

Most of the score was written prior to the film even being shot – Fendrix actually appears in the movie as a bandleader on a cruise ship – and Lanthimos then partially edited his film to fit Fendrix’s music. While I don’t usually like it when scores are written beforehand, as opposed to writing-to-picture, this is one of the few instances where that approach is successful. This isn’t a ‘write some music and drop it in where you want’ scenario like it is with someone like Mica Levi, for example. Lanthimos and Fendrix worked together very closely during the entire process, creating in detail the way that Fendrix’s music acts as a window to Bella’s mind. Although I love, and will always love, the traditional reacting-to-imagery method of film composing, that approach would likely not have worked on Poor Things, and I’m OK with that.

In an interview with Indiewire Fendrix states that his musical palette was inspired by ‘instruments that involved air and mechanics,’ and that he used an assortment of woodwinds, pipe organs, uilleann pipes, and sampled synthesized breathing noises to act as Bella’s voice – she sees and feels so much but is initially unable to fully articulate it, and has to resort to this jumbled mass of breath and sound to get her point across. Then, to illustrate Bella’s gradual emergence from her naivety and vulnerability, Fendrix brings in a larger palette of instruments, including mallets and strings, layered against the woodwinds, to illustrate her widening worldview.

As I said, though, the score as an album listening experience is a frustrating, perplexing, sometimes annoying affair, in terms of its sonics, but that’s not to say the score is without structure, because there are actually numerous recurring ideas weaving through the score. The opening cue, “Bella,” introduces the score’s main theme, a quivery out-of-tune six note motif that initially sounds like it is being played on a harp underwater, but by the end of the cue is a wash of strings, much more substantial, but somehow also so fragile it might break. It comes back numerous times throughout the score – most noticeably in the first part of “Bella/Les Yeux Bleus/Estore’s Song” – and with each new performance it has picked up a new dimension, or a new instrumental idea, and by the time it swells gorgeously in “Poor Things Finale and End Credits” it has all come into focus.

“Wee” is childlike and whimsical, feathery little textures for strings, harp, and woodwinds, which almost have a sort of a mickey-mousey onomatopoeic feel to them, an array of things that pluck and squeak and plonk, uncoordinated and awkward. “Bella and Max” is similar in its approach and has an instrumental texture that sounds like a child’s voice, and is similarly abstract, while “Mother of God” uses similar musical approaches, but in a darker way, with heavier bass sounds. This music is weird, and will drive some people to distraction, but as I said earlier this is the point – the music represents Bella’s infant state, and as such it is intentionally all over-the-place, under-formed, disjointed, and lacking in control.

“Victoria” introduces the music for the ‘old Bella,’ the woman who committed suicide off a bridge in London and was found and reincarnated by Godwin. This cue introduces one of the score’s secondary themes, a shrill four-note motif that illustrates the despair she felt prior to leaping to her doom. The subsequent “Reanimation” rearranges the same theme for a dark, anguished-sounding pipe organ surrounded by shrill voices – the creation of a new Frankenstein’s monster from the remnants of a shattered woman.

“Bella and Duncan” introduces a new and different six note motif as a theme for Duncan, the hard-drinking hard-gambling furious-jumping lothario who whisks Bella away from her sheltered life and introduces her to the carnal pleasures of the world. His theme is a sort of disjointed string cascade, a little twisted, a little dangerous, which acts as a sort of musical counterpoint to Bella’s innocence and naivety. The subsequent “I Just Hope She’s Alright” is full of energetic, frantic string rhythms backed by processed vocals and electronic pulses; it comes across as excited, almost unable to contain itself, marking the beginning of Bella’s adventures out in the world. “Lisbon” has a similar approach but has a sort of fantastical sound, shrill woodwinds backed by dreamy string textures and overly-enthusiastic, bubbling synths, again representing the overwhelming nature of Bella’s new life experiences.

The two “Portuguese Dance” pieces are part of a hilariously unorthodox dance sequence for accordions, guitars, and small string orchestra; the first is tuneful and melodic, with some influences from Portuguese fado music, while the second is more aggressive, shrill, at times almost angry, but also with a weird sense of joyousness and buoyancy. There is also a song here, “Quarto,” a traditional Portuguese fado song performed with dramatic and emotional gusto by vocalist Carminho. This part of the score climaxes in “Duncan and Martha,” which is weirdly antagonistic, and features explosions of church organ stateliness pitted against the oddness of Duncan’s motif, representing the influence that the educated and worldly Madame Martha Von Kurtzroc – a fantastic cameo by legendary German stage actress Hanna Schygulla – has on Bella’s intellect, and how that alters her relationship to Duncan.

“Alexandria” is an interesting cue as it underscores the scene where Bella – accompanied by Jerrod Carmichael’s nihilist philosopher Harry – encounters true human suffering for the first time in the form of starving children, and is unable to process the emotions she feels; in sympathy, there is initial sadness in Fendrix’s strings, and this quickly gives way to both anguish and horror. “Paris” is part of the sequence where Bella, having split with Duncan, finds herself employed in a brothel, and has a number of vastly divergent sexual experiences that, again, shape her life and her overall relationship with men. The music here is frantic and chaotic, and mass of undulating string, flute, and harp textures, punctuated and tempered by more dissonant sections of muted sound design. Finally Bella returns to “London” to visit the ailing Godwin Baxter, and the music for this sequence is warm and welcoming, almost sentimental, with soft bassoons and uilleann pipes performing a theme for Godwin that seems to be an inversion of Victoria’s theme.

Fendrix’s final character idea is the theme for General Alfred Blessington, who is revealed to be Bella’s pre-resurrection husband – it was he she was escaping from when she committed suicide in the first place. “Alfie” is Fendrix’s musical depiction of all the worst masculine traits – control, ownership, blasé cruelty, indifference to suffering – and has a harsh, dark, muffled, broken sound, with some notable writing for uncomfortably shrill bagpipes. In “Alfie and Victoria” Victoria’s theme for strings is blended with the darkness of Alfie’s theme, as husband and wife pick up their relationship at exactly the same point it was prior to Victoria’s suicide and her eventual transformation into Bella.

After the low key conclusion of “Bella, Max and God” the “Poor Things Finale and End Credits” presents an enormous consonant statement of Bella’s theme for orchestra, organ, and choir. As a result of all these life experiences the character has now fully developed into an independent, intelligent woman, a far cry from the broken and out-of-tune person she was at the beginning of the movie. This musical development, mirroring the character arc, is one of the things that makes this score so fascinating.

As you can tell, as a conceptual idea, and by way of its contextual application, I think Poor Things is a great success. This is a perfect example of a composer and a director working together to create music that is unique, original, and completely wedded to the film it accompanies – the film would not be as good as it is without it, especially the way the oddness of the score works to accentuate the cinematography and the production design. However, listening to the score as an album is at times a deeply weird experience, and fans of traditional symphonic themes-and-variations scores will likely not know what the hell to do with it, and may entirely dismiss it out of hand as just being too peculiar for its own good. And, you know, I can understand that point of view, because without film context it does come across as odd and insubstantial, out-of-tune noodling for bits of strings and plinky-plonky percussion. You really do need to experience the film to understand what the score is doing and why it sounds the way it sounds.

With that in mind, I absolutely expect Jerskin Fendrix to pick up his first Oscar nomination in the new year, and based on the current taste and trends of the Academy I would not be at all surprised to see it win. Joscelin Dent-Pooley, Mr. Fendrix, is an original voice completely unlike anything I have heard in film music for many years. Whether or not you consider this to be a good thing or not is up to you, and there has been a great deal of pushback against the originality-for-originality’s sake movement recently, but personally I think that what Fendrix has done here is one of the most successful of these ‘new approaches’. Yes it’s weird, yes it’s annoying, yes it flies in the face of conventional film music, but it is absolutely perfect for the film it accompanies – and at the end of the day, isn’t that the ultimate point?

Buy the Poor Things soundtrack from the Movie Music UK Store

Track Listing:

• Bella (1:43)
• Wee (3:40)
• Bella and Max (1:14)
• Mother of God (1:11)
• Victoria (0:53)
• Reanimation (0:58)
• Bella and Duncan (2:36)
• I Just Hope She’s Alright (0:53)
• Lisbon (2:35)
• O Quarto (traditional, performed by Carminho) (1:16)
• Portuguese Dance I (1:09)
• Portuguese Dance II (1:55)
• Goodbye Later Dove (1:51)
• Duncan and Martha (1:21)
• Alexandria (2:48)
• Paris (3:03)
• Bella/Les Yeux Bleus/Estore’s Song (‘Les Yeux Bleus’ written by Etienne Arnaud and Eugene De Lonlay, performed by Suzy Bemba) (1:37)
• London (2:20)
• Alfie (2:30)
• Alfie and Victoria (1:53)
• Bella, Max and God (1:35)
• Poor Things Finale and End Credits (4:53)

Running Time: 43 minutes 54 seconds

Milan Records (2023)

Music composed and arranged by Joscelin Dent-Pooley (Jerskin Fendrix). Recorded and mixed by Graeme Stewart. Edited by XXXX. Album produced by Jerskin Fendrix.