Warning: Spoilers ahead.
“I don’t know a single woman who doesn’t have a troubled relationship to her body,” writer-director Coralie Fargeat, said in press materials for her new film “The Substance.”
Ms. Fargeat describes herself as a feminist and her film as “a political statement to the world,” which explores the constraints of beauty culture and ageism that have “corseted women for so long.”
Part sci-fi parable, part beauty culture horror story, “The Substance” features a standard “pact with the devil,” or “be careful what you wish for” plot, familiar from classics such as “Faust,” “Frankenstein,” “Dracula” and “The Picture of Dorian Gray” — in which the hubristic defiance of God or mortality brings about catastrophe.
In this case, a woman risks everything in the pursuit of eternal youth and beauty. Sadly, it’s often hard to discern how the film is a critique — rather than a perfect example of — Hollywood’s typical commodification of female flesh.
On her 50th birthday, Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) a once-hot, now fading star of an 80s-style aerobics TV show is fired by her producer, the pointedly named “Harvey” (a super-smarmy Dennis Quaid, chewing the scenery). “It all stops at 50,” he explains to her.
“What stops?” she asks.
Harvey never responds, but there’s no need. We all understand his sexist syllogism: Fifty equals menopause; the “stopping” of fertility; the end of sexual and commercial “viability.” In other words, when the bleeding stops, so does your life.
Elizabeth, who’s made a career of her looks, is devastated, which leads her to accept a mysterious man’s offer of a mysterious “substance,” promising to restore her youthful beauty. Naturally, there’s a catch.
The injectable potion (reminiscent of the Ozempic craze, but also of Juvéderm, Botox and so many others) will split Elizabeth into two beings — a new, younger, vibrant self and her original, older self — but the two must “share” one life, alternating weeks of consciousness. While one self is awake, the other must lie paralyzed on the floor, in a kind of coma. “Remember you are one,” intones the mysterious man — advice quickly forgotten.
What follows is over two hours of increasingly grotesque images of (mainly) Demi Moore’s body being subjected to all manner of violent degradations. With the very first dose of the “substance,” her spinal column split apart, and as Elizabeth writhes naked on the bathroom floor in agony, her rejuvenated doppelganger, “Sue” (played by Margaret Qualley) emerges — “Alien”-style — from the gaping, bloody wound in her back. This then is the first gift of the “substance”: It permits the menopausal woman an alternative method of reproduction — a kind of narcissistic cloning. The newly born, nubile Sue (also naked, of course), promptly performs makeshift surgery on Elizabeth, clumsily stitching up her spine with black thread, leaving a scar worthy of Frankenstein’s monster. But this is just the beginning.
Sue plunges happily into the celebrity life Elizabeth has lost, starring in a new TV dance show, making the cover of Vogue, partying with hot guys. (Here, the movie dares a nod to the far superior “All About Eve.”)
But while Sue plays, Elizabeth lies corpse-like — and again, usually naked — on the cold floor of a tomblike room. At first, Sue respects the arrangement and takes her turn at playing corpse, giving Elizabeth her week of consciousness (this switcheroo involves a complicated procedure of potions and hypodermic needles). But Sue grows greedy, and starts leaving Elizabeth unconscious for ever-longer stretches. This upsets their delicate symbiosis and accelerates Elizabeth’s aging process. Much of the movie is devoted to watching Elizabeth’s growing horror, as she awakens periodically to discover herself morphing into a hideous crone.
Ms. Fargeat really goes to town here. In the zero-sum game of their relationship, Sue’s glamorous youth causes Elizabeth to become a toothless, decomposing, retching, bleeding, suppurating, gangrenous, wizened, internal-organ-oozing monstrosity. A nightmarish and ghastly distortion of age.
But fear not, the film devotes equal time to close-ups of physically perfect naked or nearly naked young women — mostly the very talented Ms. Qualley, along with a parade of other young beauties — often filmed from behind or below, with close attention paid to rows of shapely buttocks. The flimsy plot recedes in importance to this extravagant visual display of the gorgeous young versus the repulsive old.
The film falls right back into all it purports to dismantle: sexual prurience, exploitation and revulsion for older women.
The casting too is a troubling meta-commentary on aging and Hollywood beauty standards. At 61, Demi Moore is a nearly preternatural example of agelessness. Here, she convincingly plays a 50-year-old, but she might easily pass for still 10 years younger than that. What elixir has she been taking, we might wonder.
And yet, we are to accept Ms. Moore as the “before” model in a “before and after” story — the desperate older woman cast aside by society. Is this Ms. Fargeat’s way of demonstrating the cruelty of Hollywood’s beauty standards? Maybe. But even if so, this does not offset the film’s relentless scrutiny and commodification of its actresses, and the persistent violence against them that it depicts.
(And Ms. Moore herself has admitted to feeling insecure about her nude body onscreen.)
It’s worth noting too that Ms. Qualley is a second-generation Hollywood beauty, as the daughter of the actress and former model, Andie MacDowell. In real life, then, Ms. Qualley has already “emerged” from an older, well known star. She symbolizes the way the spotlight inevitably retrains itself on the young.
Eventually, Sue and Elizabeth descend into a frenzied, murderous struggle that ends in a surreal explosion of guts and gore. The audience may laugh or gasp, but little is resolved and nothing is learned. Instead of showing sympathy or interest in each other, the two women, halves of a single person, become mortal enemies.
This is a real missed opportunity. Imagine how fascinating — and yes, feminist — it would have been to stage a meaningful conversation between the older and younger selves, to have them learn something from each other, to accept each other.
“The Substance” figures in the long line of movies about what you might call “menopausal derangement syndrome” — the ostensibly crazy-making tragedy of a woman living past 50.
The most famous example of this genre is of course 1950’s “Sunset Boulevard,” in which 51-year old Gloria Swanson portrays a pathetic, senescent has-been. In 1961, Vivien Leigh starred in “The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone,” about a self-destructive 50-ish actress terrified of losing her beauty and career. In the 1992 dark comedy “Death Becomes Her,” Goldie Hawn and Meryl Streep, both then in their 40s, play rivals competing for a man (played by Bruce Willis — coincidentally Ms. Moore’s husband at the time) who drink a youth potion offered by a vampiric Isabella Rossellini. Catastrophe ensues (but it’s very funny).
The presumed pathos (or campy humor) of middle-age women seeking rejuvenation is having a bit of a renaissance right now. In the upcoming “Shell,” Elizabeth Berkeley, 50, plays an actress seeking to recapture her looks and Kate Hudson, 45, (another second-gen Hollywood star, daughter of Ms. Hawn) is the villainous guru peddling “eternal youth and beauty.” There is even a remake of “Death Becomes Her” opening soon on Broadway.
Given the entertainment industry’s role in promoting impossible standards of youth and beauty for women, and given how faithfully so many actresses do partake of all available products and procedures to keep themselves “viable,” it’s very “meta” for Hollywood to make films about this subject. But “meta’ is not feminist and replication of the problem is not critique. Don’t we deserve more?
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