2024-09-20 03:01:00
The substance 5 points
The SubstanceUnited Kingdom, 2024
Direction and script: Coraline Fargeat
Duration: 140 minutes
Interpreters: Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, Dennis Quaid, Gore Abrams, Robin Greer, Oscar Lasage, Tom Morton.
Released in movie theaters.
The premise of The substancea film with which French director and screenwriter Coraline Fargeat won the Best Screenplay award at the Cannes Film Festivalis one of its virtues. An idea that is not at all original but developed effectively, at least for a good part of its two hours and twenty minutes. The plot is not far from the one Oscar Wilde imagined for his only novel, The Portrait of Dorian Gray.
Just like the book, The substance plays with the convention of assimilating youth and beauty, as if they were the same thing, and the fear of aging. But it also makes some variations, changing the sex of the protagonist and altering the period of life he goes through. Unlike the young Dorian, Elisabeth Sparkle is a sixty-something actress turned fitness TV star, who is discarded when her body begins to show signs of the passage of time.. At that moment, the woman will receive a clandestine invitation to try a substance that promises to give her back “the best version of herself.” From there, the story will articulate some plot elements taken from The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hydeby Robert L. Stevenson, another fantasy classic from the Victorian period.
That the protagonist wants to recover her lost attributes instead of keeping the ones she has, as in the novel, is not an innocent change. Much less if it is about a woman who sees her life falling apart due to the iimposition of a canon of beauty who has time as his worst enemy. It is also not innocuous that the person in charge of giving life to the character is Demi Moorean actress who, at 61, questions the assumption that old age equals ugliness. But it is precisely there, when the metaphor begins to become too obvious, that the film starts to show signs of structural fatigue.
Fargeat uses devices that draw on notorious sources. From the placement of the camera, the axially symmetrical frames, the deep perspectives, the use of panoramic lenses and even the carpets or a bloodbath, everything in the staging screams from the screen: Kubrick, Kubrick! There are also traces of David Lynch in the game of doubles and the stark representation of Hollywood, which openly dialogue with Mullholand DriveAnd, of course, it is impossible not to recognize Cronenberg in the pleasure the director shows when portraying the corruption of bodies and her obsession with extracting from them everything that nature wisely placed inside.
Those who conclude from the previous paragraph that The substance It is a pastiche of cool and pretentious design. But it is also an enjoyable cinematic exercise based on its excess and its almost adolescent will to transgress. A playful and genuinely cinephile impulse that manages to go beyond the screen. The problem appears, once again, when what was a game becomes a sermon and what was fine as a prank forcefully seeks to impose itself as a univocal message.