Meat too: "The Substance"

Coralie Fargeat is the French writer-director whose tastes were apparently formed amid the turn-of-the-century New Extreme Cinema, and who's since come to translate that cinema's French variants for that English-speaking audience arthouse directors now have to court if they want to remain fully funded. Revenge, Fargeat's rape-revenge rerouting of 2017, was something like 2000's Baise-moi with a stronger visual sense and less (i.e. no) unsimulated fucking. The Substance - foremost succès de scandale of Cannes 2024, and by a long chalk the unlikeliest film ever to bear the Working Title logo - revisits the thematic territory and confrontational visual language of 2001's Trouble Every Day and 2002's In My Skin, being about a) women, b) their bodies and c) the messy tangles a) get in with b). That Fargeat is thinking more commercially than either Claire Denis or Marina de Van ever were can be deduced both from her decision to centre the film on Hollywood women, and how she forsakes those predecessors' knotty ambiguities in favour of often striking, front-and-centre images that even those traditionally averse to reading subtitles might readily understand. The strengths and limitations of the Fargeat approach are graspable from The Substance's opening five minutes: an inspired, fixed-camera evocation of the creation and subsequent besmirching of a celebratory star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and then an irksome scene-setter that involves Dennis Quaid (as a sleazy exec called Harvey, geddit) bellowing into the camera at close range while pissing all over the audience's shoes. 4DX proves an instant no-go, but even in standard 2D, this is a conspicuously ugly, wilfully grotesque film on the rigours of the high-end beauty regime.

To better connect The Substance with the multiplex crowd, Fargeat has not unsavvily cast Demi Moore in the lead role of Elizabeth Sparkle, the veteran star who submits to a disastrous deaging process in a bid to pep up her flagging career. Unlike the craggy-faced movie musclemen observed taking it all too easy amid the cosy retirement home of the Expendables series, Moore has been shown by history to relish a challenge: feigning carnal attraction to mid-period Michael Douglas and Robert Redford, working with Ridley Scott (while shaving off her own hair) on G.I. Jane, trying to maintain a leading-lady career in the wake of 1996's Striptease. The Substance, which trades openly in the physical difference between Demi Then (the dewy sylph of About Last Night and St. Elmo's Fire) and Demi Now (the harder-faced survivor of tabloid intrusion, motherhood and Tinseltown PT), undeniably presents as quite some workout for a comeback role. Moore spends the first half having to withstand the kind of unflattering lighting Bette Davis and Joan Crawford wouldn't have countenanced, so that her director might goose the viewer into wondering whether we, too, might take the desperate measures Elizabeth does: namely entering into a Dorian Gray-like lifeshare arrangement with a younger, perkier version of herself (Margaret Qualley), extracted from her own DNA. She spends the second half trapped under increasingly heavy latex, looking like Peter Boyle in the Everybody Loves Raymond reruns. 

That central transformation is at least underpinned by an internal visual logic. A restless, three-headed editing squad, including Fargeat herself, ensures these images flow, synch and pulse, however much they threaten to be obliterated by grue. Yet the film never alights on a comparable narrative logic, and if you're one of those people prone to leaning towards cinemagoing companions and whispering "that wouldn't happen", you should keep several blocks away from anywhere The Substance is screening. Sure, we're entering the realms of nightmarish fantasy: upon emerging from the Sparkle form, the Qualley doppelganger/substitute has to stitch up the neck-to-buttcrack slit left behind and then keep this shed skin fed and watered, which seems a terrible faff, and may well describe what it is to have to keep up appearances on any regular basis. Yet in the grounding human interaction Fargeat repeatedly falters: a lovestruck former classmate of Elizabeth's handing over a phone number he's dropped in a puddle (rather than, you know, writing it out again, as you would), or Sparkle herself jemmying open the back shutter of her clinic's visibly derelict premises so as to get her hands on the desired elixir of youth. Fargeat's aiming for the morgue-like rigour of a Kubrick or Cronenberg, but she fatally lacks their surgical precision; when she shows her hand, it's forever more slapdash than steady. (It strikes me as truly bizarre that the Cannes jury should have garnished her with Best Screenplay, of all prizes: snatches of the movie's dialogue sound at best inadequately translated.)

Every frame continues to exert a sticky visual compulsion. Fargeat and her design and effects team have conspired to exaggerate a world not dissimilar to ours, cranking both the colours and the neuroses way up past eleven. But an hour into The Substance, I realised it was much the same gawker tendency one gets upon glimpsing Katie Price's singular combination of lips, hips and tits in a newspaper or on TV: the compulsion is the trashier part of ourselves wondering just how big and just how bad things are going to get. (The answer, in this instance: very big and pretty bad.) The Substance likely won't be revived all that often - it's too gross to be even campily enjoyable, and conceals precisely zero hidden depths - but it may yet be projected onto the walls of some hipster bar, so the gathered patrons can ooh at the endless butt shots and eww at the sundered flesh, really the only permissible responses Fargeat's film allows us. It's far from uncommercial, resembling a series of billboards where the images are writ large enough that they couldn't be missed from space, let alone Hollywood Boulevard; it likely won't do Fargeat's career any harm whatsoever in today's film business. 

Still, from the POV of the cheap seats, it's depressing to witness the nuance, rhetoric and intelligent provocation of the French movies that inspired The Substance being drained away, leaving behind sensation without even a passing shadow of seriousness, a sorry sick joke. Fargeat heads hell-for-leather towards body horror, and then keeps mindlessly piling it on, like Demi's latex; a listless riot of broken teeth, snapped fingernails and suppurating orifices, the movie sets about doing with dysmorphia what Joker, another inexplicable recipient of a major festival prize, did with mental health, and thereby emerges as the grimmest conceivable cash-in of 2024. For all The Substance's wanton maximalism - and it feels wildly bloated and gassy at two hours twenty, lumbering on long after its last dubious ideas have left its body - any takeaways from this experience are minimal at best. A notion Fargeat may soon be snapping at Luca Guadagnino's heels for leftfield corporate branding gigs; a vague, hangover-like understanding of how hard it is to be a woman, and a woman in the entertainment industry in particular. But isn't it just as bad when all a female writer-director can think of to do with her actresses is regard them as pieces of meat?

The Substance is now playing in cinemas nationwide.