And yet, Bella is not posing for anyone. The delight of this scene is that her dance is devoid of ego, unreliant on the attention of observers. Bella is unaware that dance implies performance. The ironic presence of stuffy elites, restricted to their glazed, small-talk waltzes, is wonderful purely because Bella barely blinks an eye. Dance is an unflinching reaction, emerging with a primal urgency present also in her impulsive, predatory pursual of knowledge. Unfettered by past physical experience, Bella lives, and now moves, in a vacuum, an unrealistic though desirable example of a person unhampered by society, not lost in its maze of constructs.
Duncan’s dancefloor interjection is a sober reminder of his assumed ownership of Bella. She, though, has no reason to believe she can’t exercise free will in any given moment: her naivety births fearlessness, but not innocence. In this film, Lanthimos often blurs the lines of consent beyond distinction, but the dance scene is not one of those moments; rather, it is a landmark in Bella’s evolution as Frankenstein’s feminist monster, liberated by a certainty of her rights.
Poor Things is set in cities we know yet seem never to have seen before. Lisbon and Paris appear like paintings. Watercolour blotched skies bleed in colours almost tangible for Bella to touch and taste.
The uncanny is subtly everywhere, as defiant in logic as Dali’s hypnagogic visions. Europe is rendered surreal enough for us to accept an absurd plotline, to not be utterly repulsed by the concept of putting brains where they don’t belong. The dancefloor, however, is grounded in universal desire. How many adults do not know how it feels to dance, to play? Bella’s physicality is worth investing in as much as her dot-to-dot learning of a feminist future. And though her stop-start steps have not been ironed smooth, this is the first moment her body takes her beyond A to B. She laps up movement like she gorges on a pastel de nata, makes love, and feasts on those skies with eager eyes.
Dance is a recurring feature in Lanthimos’ films. One learns so much through a way a person moves, the shades of a character that dialogue merely grapples with. Lanthimos takes human nature, turns it inside out and back to front, and creates, albeit through morbid methods, a fresh bud of a girl, who looks out at the world in a way we never can again: with crucial, untainted frankness. What a joy to witness dance through her lens.
Unlocked by the most unpleasant melody, in this scene Bella is struck by the urge to move in a brief but rollocking reminder to ‘sing for the private joy instead of the public ear’ (Nell Dunn). That is, to move not with thought but instinct. The impulse to dance is something that, like Bella’s sexual desires and intellectual hunger, can be satisfied for one’s self but not owned by another – it is hers, and she devours it.
Take two
Lena Megyeri
When Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) gets up on the dancefloor in a Lisbon ballroom, it signals a turning point both in her life and in her relationship with her smug dandy lover, Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo). We shouldn’t be surprised: sometimes a dance can change everything, after all.
Bella is a young woman who, despite having the body of an adult, is still in the process of developing basic skills and exploring the world, much like a child. (There’s a reason for that, which is unknown to Duncan and is also only fully revealed to the spectator later on in the movie.) At the time of the Lisbon adventure her verbal skills are still moderate: she speaks in strangely roundabout, grammatically incorrect sentences. Her walking is also unnatural, her body stiff and her movements somewhat uncontrolled. Still, when she hears the first beats of the steely, mechanical music that the band starts to play, she is physically seduced: she needs to dance.
