In one of the earliest scenes in Coralie Fargeat’s latest film, “The Substance”, it warns the chief Harvey (Dennis Quaid) Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a TV -aerobics instructor, “It stays at 50.”
And since I looked at it when I was about to get into my 50th year, my answer was as dead as hers.
“What stops at 50?” She says with muted incredibility.
Over the next two hours, the film reveals the various ends that are raised by her mid -life: her appeal. Her audience. Her proximity to power. Her body. Her soul.
All this is possible because so much as “The subject” Is a movie about Elisabeth’s weekly transformation from her older, more self-conscious self to a younger, completely ID-driven Sue (Margaret Qualley), it is really about valuability and caution in certain types of female beauty. It is a meditation about the violent lengths such as media institutions, the beauty industry and the individuals representing them will go to punish women for aging and with that pushes them against revealing in their agency and all humanity.
Even more tragic, to regain power and assert herself, Elisabeth sees to inject herself with a neon substance and lasting unbearable pain to change places with his younger self. Through her and Sue’s constant prey of bodies, we see her character physically transformed without mentally developing. Instead of rejecting these standards for female perfection, Elisabeth stops being a tragic heroine, liberated only when her body is destroyed rather than deciding to find a way to live past Harvy’s cruel expiry date.
During a year where Hollywood has produced a number of rich female characters on the screen, Elisabeth’s results also got to think about fate for other leading ladies who have also undergone significant transformations: in “wicked” rotation; After her husband was arrested and the military dictatorship in Brazil keeps her, Eunice Paiva (Fernanda Torres) of “I’m still here” developed from being a home mother to a lawyer for human rights; Ani (Mikey Madison) from “Anora” strives for a life in addition to erotic dance by eloping with the son of a Russian oligarch; The titular protagonist of “Emilia Pérez” (Karla Sofía Gascón) returns from a sociopathic drug lord to a Soigné Society woman. With the great exception to Eunice, these women are only partially successful in changing the circumstances they were born.
In other words, these films ask a bigger question: Can women undermine society’s expectations of gender norms and survive whole and intact?
With its two -part film structure, “Wicked: Part One” Ends with Elphaba finding his voice, embracing his “otherness” as green and being exhausted by the magician. We have to wait until November to see how much power she can exercise in exile as the West’s evil witch. In the same way, Ani seems to be captured in an endless exchange of sex for money; Her plan to escape from the strip club puts her in more physical danger, without a fairy tale that ends in sight. Finally, as a trans character, metamorphoses Emilia Pérez most physically, and as a result of her gender-affirming operation (the film means controversial), the most psychological. But even with the large arc, Emilia’s finality always feels predetermined by either the sins in her past life or the stereotypical tragedy that often falls over transient women, especially trans women, in fiction and real life.
The most subtle and in many ways, however, belongs to the most inspired development the protagonist “I am still here” and murder of his husband, Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello), in January 1971. Not only does Eunice survive an almost two -week interrogation at a secret military facility, without trauma also raising so many instincts in her -like a mother, a wife and a goal for political persecution – that she ultimately devotes herself to raising her five children alone while keeping her husband’s legacy of dissent. The film traces Eunice’s development by showing her as a lawyer and advocates who witness the democratically elected government admits the sins in the former dictatorship and who eventually struggle with dementia at the end of his life.
Politically in another way, the “The Substance” characters are Elisabeth and Sue, whose deadly binding has led to some critics applauding the film’s feminism, while others have claimed that its progressiveness falls flat. In some ways, this debate is partly a by -product of the horror genre, where the grotesque is expected to be exaggerated; In this case, it is manifested as a product of Elisabeth’s severe body dysmorphi. But a more generous reading is that this is a case of form that imitates theme. In a movie about surface readings, it should be no surprise that its main characters are denied something actually depth. Their planness is the point.
In this regard is the end of the “subject” May better resemble another movie that focuses on the deadly toxicity in the American beauty industry: last summer’s “skincare”, with Elizabeth Banks as a famous middle -aged aesthetic who is so paranoid about losing her status and relevance that she attacks an uninterrupted rival who she blames on for sabotaging its business.
Although Fargeat’s protagonists may lack substance, I found myself after the track in her films and her obsession with showing the difference between the impossible beauty standards that are imposed on us and the deadly consequences of embracing the look as our own.
“Reality+”, her short film in 2014, follows Vincent as its average self (Vincent Colombe) and in his changed state (Aurélien Muller), whereby a brain chip allows him to see himself in his ideal physical body. The Catch: There is a 12-hour time limit that forces him to run home, ashpott-like, to avoid the discovery of a woman he wants to meet. In the end, Vincent can reject the technology that transforms him into Vincent+ and chooses an even better path.
In 2017, Fargeat followed up with “Revenge”, her debut function that struggled with the effects of patriarchal violence wrote greatly on a woman’s body. Located in a secluded holiday home in the desert, the film is about Jen (Matilda Lutz), a young prospective actress who is sexually attacked and left for death by a group of men, one of whom she has a deal with. The subsequent act is about Jen’s self -rescue and how she takes back her story, her body and her life from the men she once trusted.
“As humans in general, but especially as women, our body is such an object of discourse, of contemplation, of assessment, transformation,” Fargeat said in An interview In September, “That it plays an important role in our lives, whether we hate it, whether we take care of it or if we want to ruin it.” She added that the “subject” enabled her to explore “in a visceral way how our bodies can be destroyed, but also how they can fight and survive that destruction.”
So while Elisabeth can remain limited, Fargeat, the director, rejects the cinematic male look completely and shows how such a story limits our heroines on the screen and us as the audience who consumes their pictures.
Her authorism is the best confirmation she could give us. At the age of 48, she just seems to get started.
Salamishah Föret is Henry Rutger’s professor of Africana studies and creative writing and the CEO of Express Newark, a center for art, design, digital story and social justice at Rutgers University-Newark. Foet won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism for his work as a contributing critic in general for the New York Times. She is the author of “In Search of the Color Purple: The Story of a American Masterpiece” and the upcoming “All the Rage: Nina Simone and the World She did.“
This story first appeared to Wire Issue by Thewrap’s Awards Magazine. Read more from the question here.
