Fabrice Andrivon’s review: “The Substance”, a trashy film that divides

If there’s a divisive film on screens right now, it’s a good one The Substancethe trashy film by Coralie Fargeat, awarded the screenplay prize at Cannes.

We understand when we discover it: we will love or hate this essay on aging bodies, this fantastic adventure of a fifty-year-old (Demi Moore, involved) who doubles up as a sexy young girl, thanks to a miracle and dangerous chemical.

Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, Cinderella: many myths are invoked in this formalist and frontal film, chaining together provocations (the director’s salacious look at her heroine’s body) and poker moves (an ending bathed in blood ).

Let’s admit that we are rather in the camp of the film’s detractors: grimacing actors, clunky script, repetitive and boring rhythm, slightly tired Cronenberg-style imagery, not to mention this uncomfortable look at women, it’s hard to really like the film. the schoolgirl insolence of Fargeat, who accumulates clichés about show business with a lot of pose and pretension.

Boredom and simplism

The film wakes up a little in its last reel, a tribute to the horror genre that dares to be a grand guignol with its foam monster, its buckets of hemoglobin and its punk side.

But that’s not enough to compensate for the two hours of boredom, the ugliness of the whole thing and the simplism of this stupid story, which forgets to ask the real question that it nevertheless announced: what is it to be a 50 year old woman when she was young and beautiful, what does it mean to age in our society of appearance?