(What lovely alliteration.)

Paris, Texas

A man walking, walking, walking. When he collapses, a doctor finds his home address in a pocket and contacts his brother, who comes to take him back home. So it’s the Odyssey, with his brother acting as Telemachus. But when he gets home, he’s as in Scrapper, as his son never knew his dad but now has to come to terms with him. Which he does, and they go looking for the man’s wife…

Poor Things

A Frankensteinian feast of steampunk, spawning feminist questions about whether showing a woman really enjoying sex is liberatory or oppressive.

Easier to compare with Saltburn – an over-the-top Gothic fantasy whose Gormenghastian protagonists’ arcs rise to take over the castle, or whatever.

How they are related

Alliteration aside, the connection must be the two brothels – one where the hero’s wife is discovered making her living, the other where Emma Stone becomes (financially) independent of Mark Ruffalo. The Paris, Texas one is weird (at least as far as my limited experience can tell) in that each room is dressed up as a different kind of room where the punters can get the women to act out their particular fantasies. Whereas the Poor Things one is just a rough and ready Parisian knocking shop (with, btw, a wonderfully wise old madam). It’s the non-brothel sets of Poor Things which form a parallel to the little rooms in the Paris, Texas brothel – huge and dripping with every luxury and elaborate decoration, vast skies of shifting colours and patterns, vistas and backdrops to the journey of sexual discovery undertaken by our heroine…