Here it is, finally arriving in theaters, the cinematic shock of 2024: The Substance (The substance), by Coralie Fargeat. This hard-line allegory of female ageism and internalized misogyny is unlike anything else. Like Julia Ducournau with Titanium Three years ago, Coralie Fargeat ventured into the lands of body horror (body horror) previously marked by David Cronenberg, and appropriates them in passing. In doing so, the screenwriter, director and co-editor, for whom this is only the second feature film, deploys a furiously baroque and satirical, bloody and symbolic vision.
Midnight Madness Audience Award at the recent TIFF and previously Best Screenplay Award at Cannes (but my Palme d’Or), The Substance stars Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a former silver screen star who became a mid-80s aerobics queen. But on the eve of Elisabeth’s fiftieth birthday, her boss, claiming to speak on behalf of the public, decrees that it is time to hire a younger, prettier, sexier figurehead for the show…
Elisabeth is not only sent away, she is made invisible: she’s out of the picture, the old woman! Ready to do anything to preserve her celebrity, or even to continue to exist, she decides to inject herself with the substance of the title, acquired on the black market through a mysterious company promising an “improved” version of herself.
Alongside this serum that Demi Moore administers to herself, the elixir of youth that rejuvenates Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn in Death Becomes Her (Death becomes you so well), it’s small beer.
Demi Moore’s Letting Go
Speaking of Demi Moore, a digression is necessary regarding the decision to give her the lead role. The highest-paid actress in Hollywood during the 1990s, she was, like her character, cavalierly “shortened” as she approached forty (50 is the new 40), in addition to being the subject of often murderous press.
But there is more. After the Cannes premiere of The SubstanceI wrote about the presence of the actress: “Entrusting the role of Elisabeth to Demi Moore is genius. She who, famously, looks like she hasn’t aged in thirty years. The star […] does not so much break her image as pulverize it. With a remarkable generosity and letting go considering the absolute control she has always maintained over her public image, Demi Moore lets herself be filmed from every angle (literally), in a way that is not necessarily flattering, but always revealing.
So Elisabeth gives birth – literally, but not in the usual way – to Sue, who is “younger, more beautiful, sexier”.
The catch? The original and his double must imperatively take turns every seven days. Except that Sue, intoxicated by the adoring glances, quickly monopolizes this shared existence. For Elisabeth, it’s “toss it out, old lady!”, take two.
But here she is, rebelling; here she is, fed up. The sequel, like everything that came before, will certainly cause some jaws to drop.
The further the film goes, the more Coralie Fargeat indulges in uninhibited grand guignol. These grotesque outbursts allow the filmmaker to denounce, through absurdity, the cult of youth and its ageist corollary, from which women suffer first and foremost, who, through age-old social pressures, internalize these misogynistic dictates.
Playing with striking compositions, exaggerated close-ups or even an amplified depth of field, this, for evocative purposes, the staging is extremely stylized. Because, as mentioned, Coralie Fargeat pursues a deeply allegorical and symbolic approach, as she confirmed to us during a recent interview.
Self-determined renaissances
In this regard, the filmmaker finds herself pushing up a notch the feminist themes and concerns addressed in her first feature film, the formidable Revenge. For the record, we are following this exercise, which subverts the clichés of the calamitous horror sub-genre of “rape and revenge” (rape-revenge), a young woman raped and left for dead by her married lover and his two friends, in a vengeful journey that becomes almost mythical.
Interestingly, in Revenge as in The Substancewe witness the symbolic death of the heroine, then her rebirth in a more self-determined version. The difference being that, in the second film, the first rebirth having occurred for the wrong reasons, a second rebirth will be imposed – see and understand.
Brilliant, consistent, Coralie Fargeat makes no concessions. Nevertheless, the filmmaker could have “hit a wall”, as they say, with her predilection for extremes, transgression in all directions and “gore” flashes of brilliance exploding like so many flashes of brilliance. But Coralie Fargeat smashes the wall.
Hallucinatory and hallucinatory, the result must be seen to be believed.
