Heart of Stone: Courageous Emma rocks trippy, surrealistic coming-of-age feminist fantasy

“Poor Things” -- 4 stars

I have not witnessed a motion picture this robustly imaginative, this ferociously sexual, this optically explosive and this politically incendiary since Helen Mirren starred in Peter Greenaway’s originally X-rated 1989 excursion into strangeness “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover.”

Imagine, if you will, Monty Python animator Terry Gilliam directing a screenplay by a feminist Mary Shelley, with production design by Tim Burton and Georges Melies, visual effects by Pablo Picasso, and jarringly dissonant music by a talented composer who may not be from our solar system.

Yet, all that still doesn’t accurately describe the experiential joys to be had watching Yorgos Lanthimos’ trippy, visionary, coming-of-age surrealistic fantasy “Poor Things.”

It opens with a haunting suicide attempt of a woman gracefully falling off a bridge.

A brilliant but nutty scientist and surgeon named Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe, with a face resembling a quilting bee accident) rescues her unborn baby by installing the tiny brain into the head of the young woman. Baxter calls her Bella.

Emma Stone walks a dangerous highwire here with her daring portrayal of Bella. One slip, one miscalculation or misjudgment in tone or content could turn this movie – and her full-tilt go-for-broke performance – into an embarrassment and career disaster.

With courageous abandonment, Stone throws away any pretense of playing for audience sympathy. She creates a free and independent female Frankenstein’s monster with a voracious appetite for life, sex, discovery and purpose.

All this after breaking the shackles of a polite and paternalistic society filled with men, such as attorney Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), who imagines he can control his energetic new lover but is exceedingly mistaken.

The early part of “Poor Things” – set in black-and-white, Jack-the-Ripper-era England – follows Bella as her baby brain awkwardly takes in the world. She bumps into things, throws tantrums and doesn’t wear diapers, even though she needs them.

Godwin – metaphorically shortened to “God” by Bella -- hires a college student named Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) to keep records about his experiment. Max carefully observes and helps Bella as she mentally ages into her body, until one day she discovers the joys of sexual gratification using pieces of fruit.

This is where Stone truly shines, by combining comic relief with adorable sincerity that blunts the dicey edge of Bella’s sudden awareness of, then frequent practice of, sex, sex, sex.

“Why do people not do this all the time?” she wonders, capitalizing on Tony McNamara’s wry, witty dialogue in a compact screenplay adapted from Alasdair Gray’s novel.

Bella’s quick emancipation from inbred social and religious constraints continues when Duncan brings her along on a Yellow Submarine-ish cruise ship where she meets Martha (Hanna Schygulla) and her acerbic pal Harry (Jerrod Carmichael), who introduces Bella to the cruelty of the real world, inspiring her quest to help people in need.

Then it’s on to Paris, where a financially strapped Bella logically combines her need for cash and love of sex by becoming a prostitute along with a new friend and colleague (Suzy Bemba).

These characters not only populate a succession of jaw-dropping worlds filled with elaborate and fantastic production designs, they work with a quirky cast of hybrid animal creations – parts of chickens, dogs, ducks and pigs sewed together by Godwin -- wandering around the edges of the screen like those tiny cartoons planted In the page margins of old Mad magazines.

With its celebration of women taking control of their bodies and destinies, reading and learning (practices Duncan opposes), and making their own choices, “Poor Things” is exactly the sort of movie that politically repressive societies would never allow.

That we can see movies as challenging and critical as “Poor Things” in theaters and on streaming services testifies to our continuing support for freedom of the arts.

Just thought I’d mention it.

* * *

Starring: Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef

Directed by: Yorgos Lanthimos

Other: A Searchlight Pictures theatrical release. Rated R for language, nudity, sexual situations. 141 minutes