Film of Alasdair Gray's Poor Things doesn't suffer from London setting or its 'male gaze' – Laura Waddell

Poor Things’ character Bella Baxter conducts her own experiments with mind and body in an attempt to satisfy her intellectual curiosity

Before I went to see Poor Things, I was vaguely aware of the energetic discussion around director Yorgos Lanthimos changing its setting from Glasgow to London, and found the whole thing – by which I mean that everyone I knew seemed to have a strong opinion and expected everyone else to be partaking in this conversation in the ether – off-puttingly claustrophobic. I didn’t want to go in seeing the thing contextualised every which way in advance.

I deeply enjoyed Lanthimos’ previous film The Favourite and even more so, The Lobster, and was excited to see how this international art film director, with his own interest in the surreal and fetishistic, might draw out those themes from within Alasdair Gray’s work. I enjoyed Poor Things even more than anticipated.

Back in 2017, I guest-edited for a day the online magazine Bella Caledonia. One of my commissions was a conversation about Glasgow in music and art between musicians Sarah Martin, of Belle and Sebastian, and Leo Condie, then frontman of pop band WHITE. The chat circled back to Alasdair Gray and how perfectly encompassing his quintessential quote about Glasgow’s magnificence. It touches me every time with its tenderness for our city: “Because nobody imagines living here… think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he’s already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn’t been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively.”

Emma Stone plays Bella Baxter in the film version of Alasdair Gray's Poor Things (Picture: Eamonn M McCormack/Getty Images for Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures UK)

Poor things explores cerebral caverns

Now had Lanark, with its intrinsically Glaswegian setting, been moved to London, I’d join the riot. But when Poor Things showed a wide shot of the London skyline, brief enough that it mattered little where it was, I thought it only a bit of a shame Lanthimos hadn’t picked up this gauntlet, and that the shot wasn’t instead panning across Glasgow’s ever poignant gothic melodrama or even the old town of Edinburgh suggested by the spherical surgeon’s theatre moments before.

But the journey of Poor Things is ultimately through the cerebral caverns, not any physical reality like ours. And while it’s part of the Gray of it all, the stuff aficionados feel much warmth for, I don’t think the sections of the book moaning about Glasgow City Council of the 1980s needed to make it into the film either for it to be a successful adaptation for an international, Oscars watching audience.

Under that same guest editorship, I invited a conversation between playwrights Henry Bell and Sara Shawaari about developing their ‘Cairene adaptation’ of Gray’s novel 1982, Janine. Titled Haneen, after some concern about the content, there was a staging in Cairo the following year.

Raphael Cormack, writing about it for the TLS literary magazine, said he hadn’t expected to come across “this quasi-pornographic Scottish monologue” in Cairo, but the connection was sparked, ultimately, because Shawaari found parallels between the psyches of the destructively self-hating Scottish narrator and the misogynistic, down-at-heel characters in the work of Egyptian playwright Mikhail Ruman.

That the work of “our” Alasdair Gray, that rare and special multifaceted talent, that Glaswegian genius, is being presented to the world without his name and address being underlined comes amidst longstanding anger about a wider lack of respect for the value and quality of Scottish art. There’s a fierce protectiveness in the debate over representing his Scottishness, as well as more than a hint of projection in the clamour for recognition.

British interest in Scottish art

It’s still utterly true that Scottish art and life and culture aren’t represented with the depth or breadth they should be across ostensibly British media, with decision-makers dismissive of even Scotland’s most celebrated and here revered cultural output as a niche minority interest, endlessly othered unless they can be hammered into whatever shape will tickle Londoncentric ‘nations and regions’ commissioners holding all the cards.

It can be very difficult to get mainstream British arts coverage to take an interest in Scottish art without somehow reducing it to its Scottishness. Our cultural product often gets choked at the neck and branded on the buttocks with ‘from Scotland’ before it gets to Carlisle. The innards have barely a chance of being inspected.

But the Lanthimos adaptation isn’t coming from that tradition of a monotonously minimising, wilfully thick-skulled lack of interest in an ‘other’ culture. It has flaws – Willem Defoe’s Scottish accent is distracting – but there are fleeting moments of magic when his singsong cadence mirrors Gray’s idiosyncratic voice, which he studied on tapes. Mostly I feel glad-hearted to see a Scottish artist’s work deservedly picked up and played with in a way that feels exciting, breathes life into it, and sets it free – not least from our own cultural navel-gazing.

In a recent Guardian summary of critics’ reactions (some of whom seemed unable to conceive that the film was a fantasy), I most agreed with Charlotte Higgins, who said “the phrase ‘male gaze’ has been attached to the film, owing to the triumvirate of Gray, screenwriter Tony McNamara and director Yorgos Lanthimos. However, unless informed to the contrary, I regard [actor Emma] Stone as an artist and a person in her own right, who has chosen to embody [central character] Bella in delicious ways of her own devising”.

Indeed Stone, through her expressive marble green eyes, fully inhabits Bella Baxter, a character completely curious about the world. There is no overthinking here, just sheer decisiveness and organic, sensual responses that propel her momentum through the world.

The grand fantasy of Poor Things is not what Bella Baxter does sexually but a universe where she can conduct her own experiments with mind and body, doing what she will as it pleases her, living a life ultimately driven by the satiation of her own intellectual curiosity – a magnificent, and thrilling prospect.