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Digital Tunisia
| 2 hours ago
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THE SUBSTANCE, the film that is making waves around the world is in Tunisian theaters.
A gory fiction with a touch of humor written and directed by Coralie Fargeat and played by Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley. This is a very sophisticated and feminist gore film carried by a trio of women behind and in front of the camera.
The film made its world premiere at the last Cannes Film Festival, it won the prize for best screenplay and especially shocked festival-goers.
THE SUBSTANCE marks the big return of Demi Moore who clearly hasn’t said her last word. She, who in the 90s was the highest paid actress in Hollywood, playing legendary and unforgettable roles like Kim Basinger and Sharon Stone, is back in 2024, enhancing her 60 years.
Here we come back in the “skin” of Elizabeth Sparkle, an aging television figure considered annoying by the producer of the channel who is ending her career. For this role, Demi Moore dares to go all out: she lets herself be filmed close to the camera which describes every wrinkle on her face and every imperfection for a literal and figurative exposure.
Imagine becoming a better version of yourself! That’s the promise of this film.
With THE SUBSTANCE you can generate another version of yourself, younger and more beautiful, embodied by Margaret Qualley in the character of Sue…You are the matrix, you share time, seven days for one, seven days for the other, but remember that you are one. And from there the whole film makes sense.
The film therefore alternates two lives, two careers, two ambitions, two egos but also two bodies. In short, two women. When one sleeps for the seven days, the other takes action.
THE SUBSTANCE is a film which disturbs, which titillates, which oppresses. This is the goal of its director who takes a feminine look at the dictates of the body and the standards of beauty governed exclusively by a masculine universe played by Dennis Quaid in the role of Harvey. Director Coralie Fargeat explores extremely frenetic cinematographic paths and insists on making reference to genre cinema. From the outset the Kubrickian reference is announced, we almost have SHINING and 2001 A SPACE ODYSSEY before our eyes. David Cronenberg is also clearly there.
THE SUBSTANCE is a film meticulously constructed about an entire system of power, surveillance, dependence and domination. THE SUBSTANCE is a film about the very definition of the gaze: how we look at ourselves and how we are looked at. The mirror, the reflection, the image take up a considerable place, the desire to be looked at structures the story of the narration, something which accentuates the idea of identification in the spectator and permanently stimulates this desire, even pleasure to be admired. What is interesting in this film is the female gaze carried by the two characters (Elisabeth and Sue), one of whom is passive and the other active, a gaze which, every seven days, offers a unique experience to this one.
THE SUBSTANCE is in extreme paroxysm: blood, flesh, ugliness but above all dehumanization. The director opts for repetition in the staging, quite often leaving aside the dialogues. This same staging succeeds in ensuring that we do not fall into the psychologization of female characters nor into the fascination of the body. On the other hand, in the end the director could have avoided these repetitions which caused unnecessary lengths leaving this feeling of a film which “has difficulty ending”.
THE SUBSTANCE is indeed the film of a new generation of women filmmakers who are investing in other notions of femininity, who represent new feminine experiences revealing a new audacity of female gaze and above all a film in which Demi Moore has been absent from film for a long time successful, seems to be taking its revenge against the Hollywood industry. A mirror film of her own career where she clearly tells you: “It’s still me”!
A film to watch!
Throw HAOUALA
Lecturer in audiovisual techniques and cinema
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