Poor Things, clunkiness and a wine pairing

Bella embarks on a psychedelic gap year | CREDIT: Filmaffinity

There has been many a superlative thrown around for Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things recently – “entirely astounding”, “a wild, wild ride”, “a feminist fever dream” and, my favourite, a “technicolorgasmic delirium”. 

Poor Things, written by Tony MacNamara and based on Alisdair Gray's 1992 novel of the same name, centres on Bella Baxter, a Frankenstein-esque creation forced into existence by Dr Godwin (God) Baxter, whose infantile brain develops at an extraordinary rate. Not content with her sheltered life at Godwin’s mansion, she embarks on a psychedelic “gap year” with Mark Ruffallo’s splendidly chauvinistic Duncer Wedderburn, propelling her onto a journey of intellectual, sexual, emotional and physical self-discovery.

There is little use in adding to the ever-growing list of grandiose adjectives to describe this film, and you can find many commentaries on its themes of feminism, science fiction and appetites (sexual or otherwise). For the purposes of this wine pairing, I want to focus on the idea of “clunkiness”, a word that’s often used as a negative criticism in film and in wine.

With each location, the mood changes | CREDIT: Filmaffinity

Lanthimos’ narrative is purposefully clunky: it begins in black and white, focusing on Bella’s “childhood” years as she expands her vocabulary and has little to no moral awareness, eagerly stabbing corpses with an infantile glee. From there we shift suddenly to the kaleidoscopic Hieronymus-Bosch-meets-Van-Gogh Lisbon with its dreamy pink, blue and yellow pastels; and then again, a brief blackout leads swiftly to the dark, almost inky, landscape of the vast sea.

This pattern continues (see also the transition from the sweltering orange heat of Alexandria to the white and greys of snowy Paris) before coming full circle back to steampunk-ish London, each location separated with Lars von Trier-esque intertitles. With each location, the mood changes, the supporting characters change, and Bella’s perception of the world changes – all rather quickly, and not quite seamlessly. 

The clunkiness is jarring, if not uncomfortable; a mish-mash of tone and colours and emotions. Even Bella’s development is somewhat out of rhythm, with each location she climbs another wrung of Maslow’s hierarchy, but her growth, like her birth, is unnatural, out of sequence.

Meanwhile, Jerskin Fendrix’s score accentuates this dissonance, using various woodwinds, mallets and strings that (somehow) mimic Bella’s absurd enlightenment. Wendy Ide goes as far as to describe the music at one point as like “a hippo mating with a harmonium”. Enough said.

The clunkiness is jarring, if not uncomfortable | CREDIT: Filmaffinity

This is of course deliberate and, in a way, rather harmonious. You only have to look at Godwin’s face, the gawkish hybrid animal pets, or indeed Shelley’s Frankenstein to realise clunkiness, paradoxically, ties the film together. 

Anyway, onto the wine and for this film I can’t think of a better pairing than Ancre Hill Orange Wine, itself also gloriously clunky. Albariño grapes grown in – wait for it – Monmouthshire in south-east Wales, hand-harvested and macerated for 35 days to give it a deep orange colour; it’s then aged for 10 months in Austrian oak. Spain-meets-Wales-meets-Austria. There’s no filtration à la Bella who also happens to lack any sort of filter. 

It’s funky, experimental – a wild, wild ride almost doesn’t cut it. Expect sweet and savoury notes of bruised yellow apples, juicy tangerine, herbs (like thyme and oregano) and plenty of straw; it’s like tucking into a bale of hay and washing it down with sharp blood orange juice afterwards. One Vivino reviewer described it as “absolutely mad”. I think that sums up both the film and the bottle quite neatly.

Poor Things is currently out in cinemas. Ancre Hill Orange Wine, from Grape Britannia, is £24.99