When you get right down to it, aren’t feminine beauty standards really gross and absurd?
That is the point that Coralie Fargeat jack-hammers into the audience with her film The Substance, a movie that is thematically as broad and as blunt as it is stylistically graphic and repulsive. And it is very much meant to be this overt in a way that few satires dare to be for fear of bogging down the point. But every so often, someone like Leos Carax or Boots Riley can just go nuts with their brazen commentary, by casting it against a world so extravagant or an emotion so raw, and Fargeat is honestly more excessive in her proclivities. The Substance is a sharp, vividly pointed movie, deeply uncomfortable and bizarre -and not just in the freakish body horror elements. It is a firm movie in its vicious conviction and by the end certainly not anything you’ve likely experienced in the cinema before.
The movie stars Demi Moore -a very calculated casting choice given her tabloid history that often revolved around her ageing and body image. And she plays a figure who almost seems to be a direct comment on that image: Elisabeth Sparkle, a once beloved Hollywood star now hosting an aerobics show, who on her fiftieth birthday is both fired and survives a major car crash. Deeply depressed over her age and perceived fading beauty, she is introduced to a drug called The Substance that promises to replicate her into a ‘younger, better version’ of herself. She takes it, and through a violent birthing process a younger self called Sue, played by Margaret Qualley, is created. The two share a vague splintered connection but distinct consciousness, and the strict rules of the Substance mandate that their separate bodies switch off on alternating weeks, risking hideous consequences otherwise.
Of course the movie is fairly hideous even before Elisabeth starts using the Substance -Fargeat renders her world in extremes of minimalist design that are downright Kubrickian, and highly hyperbolic caricatures of human beings, chief among them Elisabeth and Sue’s skeezy producer boss Harvey, played to wicked flamboyance by Dennis Quaid. And it is all matched by intentionally repellent camera-work -many an extreme close-up on Harvey’s face as he smiles perversely or his disgusting mouth as he eats messy shrimp- that exist in methodical contrast to the images presented of women’s bodies -Sue’s specifically, once she takes over Elisabeth’s show.
Fargeat doesn't just adopt the male gaze, she pushes it to the point of absurdity. Montage of the routine of Sue's show, which very quickly loses the plot of being a fitness exercise and is already made to be more sexually explicit in choreography and costuming, is shot and cut together with a pseudo-pornographic closeness and intensity, all the while sharply cutting back to the eye of the camera filming it. Forcing the audience to sit uncomfortably with both the salacious display and the symbol of their voyeurism, it is the most direct interpretation of Mulvey I've ever seen. And yet there is a very intentional numbing effect to this, and all the other scenes in which Sue's body is objectified to such a degree it ceases to have any erotic power. What Fargeat gets at with startling efficacy is how bodies, specifically women’s bodies, are just mounds of shapely flesh and fat, and mocks the very notion of aestheticizing them sexually.
But while she does this, she doesn't diminish at all the effects of this cultural aestheticizing on women. Elisabeth is so depressed and dissatisfied in her body, constantly judging herself against her past beauty. A giant portrait of her younger self hangs in her penthouse, the starkest of the film's many allusions to The Picture of Dorian Gray. Though unlike her literary precedent, she must live alongside her younger more beautiful counterpart. None of this is down purely to her though, as the film emphasizes the cultural bombardment of a certain standard of youthful beauty and what it has conditioned Elisabeth to believe about her own body. Conventional sex appeal is critical, as we see it is the first thing that Sue admires about herself when she comes into consciousness. It is an ordained shallowness that Fargeat is keen to demonstrate is not just a pandering to base heterosexual desire -it is a way of conditioning women, and especially ageing women, into a certain toxicity of self-image, and it can be utterly heartbreaking. At one point during her week of consciousness, haunted by a giant billboard outside her window of a sultry Sue, Elisabeth agrees to a date with an old acquaintance from high school who is genuinely attracted to and flustered by her as she is -but next to Sue she cannot see herself as beautiful enough and her bitter self-loathing gets the better of her.
The scene is a highlight of Moore’s performance, though she is tremendous all the way through -the best showcase she’s been given in many years and she rises to its every wrenching demand and act of critical physical vulnerability. And much of it without dialogue -the film is fairly sparse for it. Qualley is a great counterpoint -in just as demanding and vulnerable a role though to a different end. Even as the movie is inconsistent on exactly the nature of their shared identity, she channels Moore’s younger self (at least in her screen presence) very well, and makes for a very visceral antagonist. Though of course, Moore could be seen as the antagonist to Qualley as both characters come to resent one another, wishing to sever the tie, or if not to at least sabotage the other’s life and success -though at great cost to themselves.
This of course takes the form of quite gnarly and elaborate bodily transformation rendered through exceptionally vivid prosthetics. As should be clear by now, Fargeat does nothing by half-measures, pushing the extremes of her metaphor and her audience's comfort levels with each new effect that comes of the irresponsible abuse of the Substance, creating images of ugliness as outrageous as the indulgences of beauty. The Substance itself has no face or visible manufacturer -to get her refills, Elisabeth has to go to a secret lab in a very sketchy part of the city- but of course the voice, both when interacting remotely and in the minds of the women, is that of a brash, commanding man. Because of course it is an intangible patriarchy that preys on women's physical insecurities and would see age and disfigurement as the ultimate punishment. For as much as Fargeat may satirize the vanity and shallowness of a star like Elisabeth, the pride and ruthless ambition of a Sue, her threads always lead back to the real culprit. And there is something to the unmitigated, uncensored vivacity of her convictions and their deranged illustration here that makes the movie's blatant commentary more cathartic than didactic.
The final act of the movie is both where this effect reaches its zenith and where it comes close to falling apart (in more ways than one). The central grotesque choice in the ending somewhat overshoots its point on the cultural absurdity of beauty standards into shock value aesthetics that appear to mock deformity; and ironically play into some of those accepted conventions of beauty it opines to criticize. Elsewhere in the film that tightrope is walked carefully, but here it notably stumbles. At the same time the excess does buffet some of this, especially in the movie's very last stretch that is unrepentantly gross and wilder than anything else in the film -but that also contains a couple of the movie's most perfectly biting visuals.
The Substance is bookended by an overhead shot of Elisabeth's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame -both instances coloured by stark if obvious symbolism. There is a reason why Fargeat, a French filmmaker, chose Hollywood as her chief target for a theme that has broad reach through our culture. Perhaps that world isn't ground zero for the insidious image of feminine youth and desirability that has overtaken society, but it is perhaps historically the most prevalent enforcer of it. Demi Moore hasn't had a role like this in years, and the reason for that is exactly why Fargeat had to make this movie.
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