Emma Stone from Poor Creatures! she's like Barbie

The most precious thing that Poor creatures! teaches us is that, despite the passing of the centuries, it seems clear that, in 2024 as in 1891, men often claim the right to decide for a woman's body as if it were their property. The news is full of news about female bodies abused, trampled, destroyed and charred, always with an insidious and toxic male matrix behind them that continues to leverage possession and, above all, domination. But what happens when a woman can decide for herself and for his body, not caring about conventions and, in particular, of that prejudice that continues to see female sexual freedom as something wrong and dangerous? Through a film with a strong metaphorical value, peppered with dozens of wide angles and a good dose of slightly macabre and slightly disgusting details, Lanthimos in Poor Creatures stages precisely this: the conquest by a woman of wildest freedom of allthe sexual and bodily one which presupposes the mental one and ideas.

Using a little girl trapped in a woman's body – the definition is literal, given that the protagonist Bella Baxter was implanted with the brain of the fetus she was carrying in her womb – Lanthimos shoots a masterpiece that demonstrates how small and insignificant men make themselves in front of a woman who is not afraid of judgement and who, thanks to experience, manages to understand how to extricate herself within “good society” so as not to remain its slave. Through an Oscar-winning performance in which she indulges in countless nude scenes, pasteis de nata eaten in one bite and dresses with exaggerated puffy sleeves, Emma Stone looks very similar to Margot Robbie's Barbieconsidering that both characters aim for freedom starting from two different assumptions – Barbie from the humanization of feelings and Bella from sexual pleasure.

Margot Robbie in Barbie's Dreamhouse in Barbie.From Warner Bros/Everett Collection.

Through an individual journey that leads them to question the pleasures of life (Bella) and the meaning of death (Barbie), it is clear that she is the protagonist of Poor Creatures that that of the film directed by Greta Gerwig reach the same conclusion: nothing scares a man more than a woman who is not afraid of anything. Barbie and Bella are similar because they understand how the world works by experiencing its wickedness and brutality first hand. They do so with initial naivety, considering that both are two creations – Bella was created by the scientist Godwin Baxter, who calls himself God which in English means God, while Barbie was assembled by the entrepreneur Ruth Handler – and both need to live the experience to understand who they are. Bella starts from sex to become aware of her body, while Barbie starts from curiosity about what surrounds her until she reaches the certainty that her determination also comes from her being a woman – exemplary, in this sense, is the gynecological examination that closes the film -. On the other hand, both in Poor Creatures that in Barbiethere are men: small, disoriented, ridiculed, at the mercy of women who manage to crush them simply because at the end of the day they know what they want. This is the message that makes the two films so close, and this is the meaning of two works that, through different styles, communicate the same thing: it is the freedom of women that scares men the most.