LE MONDE'S OPINION – SEE IT
Bette Davis was responsible for the emergence of the hag horror genre that caused a rage in the 1960s. Launched by Robert Aldrich's What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), this sub-category of the horror film featured old Hollywood glories demonetized into the roles of psychopathic shrews. Isolation, decrepitude, maternal or sexual frustration: Hag horror draws on the pool of clichés associated with female aging, and stretches them to the proportions of a macabre, parodic tale.
Coralie Fargeat's The Substance, a minor phenomenon at Cannes where it won the Best Screenplay prize, is a resurgence of the genre. The film follows Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a former Hollywood star turned aerobics show host, who is fired on her 50th birthday. Desperate to regain her youth, she obtains a miraculous substance on the black market. The only rule: Every other week, Elisabeth must become herself again. Deal. She injects herself with the antidote and "gives birth" to Sue (Margaret Qualley), a splendid creature who will enjoy everything Los Angeles has to offer – and come back for more.
Viewing The Substance, the audience loses itself in a cinephile labyrinth engulfing pop references at breakneck speed: from Jane Fonda's aerobic period to Stanley Kubrick, Brian De Palma and David Cronenberg, Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls (1995) and Robert Zemeckis's Death Becomes Her (1992). It's genre cinema digested and regurgitated in long, flashy, clip-like sequences, pumped up with gushing effects. The film can be criticized for its tendency to underline everything it says, leaving little room for growth in the shadow.
But what if the absence of shadow were the subject of The Substance? What if this is its subject: women's bodies under the merciless sun of the digital high-definition image, scrutinized, scanned and shredded by our gaze. Rarely have we seen a former sex symbol (whose career has been built on traditional film) allow herself to be examined by this unforgiving precision of imagery, offering nudity that has nothing erotic about it. Everything is surgical. Moore lets everything through: fine lines, pores, cosmetic surgery and athletic discipline that do little to conceal the inexorable work of age.
The film is the spectacle of an actress who, now that she is no longer an image, goes through all kinds of states: Disney witch, shapeless mass of flesh, carcass lying on the floor, drained from having had to please so many.
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