In one of the earliest scenes in Coralie Fargeat’s latest film, “The Substance,” the gluttonous boss Harvey (Dennis Quaid) warns Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a TV aerobics instructor, “It stops at 50.”
And because I was watching it as I was on the verge of entering my 50th year, my response was as deadpan as hers.
“What stops at 50?” she says with muted incredulity.
Over the next two hours, the film reveals the various ends precipitated by her midlife: Her appeal. Her audience. Her proximity to power. Her body. Her soul.
All of this is possible because as much as “The Substance” is a movie about Elisabeth’s weekly transformation from her older, more self-conscious self into a younger, completely id-driven Sue (Margaret Qualley), it is really about the preciousness and precariousness of certain types of female beauty. It is a meditation on the violent lengths that media institutions, the beauty industry and the individuals that represent them will go to punish women for aging and, with that, pressure them against reveling in their agency and full range of humanity.
Even more tragically, to regain power and assert herself, Elisabeth resorts to injecting herself with a neon substance and enduring unbearable pain to swap places with her younger self. Through her and Sue’s constant swapping of bodies, we see her character physically transform without psychologically evolving. Rather than outwardly rejecting these standards of female perfection, Elisabeth ends up being a tragic heroine, freed only when her body is destroyed rather than deciding to find a way to live past Harvey’s cruel expiration date.
In a year in which Hollywood has produced a bevy of rich female characters on screen, Elisabeth’s outcome also made me rethink the fate of other leading ladies who have also undergone significant transformations: In “Wicked,” Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) moves from reticence to revolution; after her husband is arrested and the military dictatorship in Brazil detains her, Eunice Paiva (Fernanda Torres) of “I’m Still Here” evolves from being a stay-at-home mother to a human rights lawyer; Ani (Mikey Madison) of “Anora” strives for a life beyond erotic dancing by eloping with the son of a Russian oligarch; the titular protagonist of “Emilia Pérez” (Karla Sofía Gascón) reinvents herself from a sociopathic drug lord to a soigné society woman. With the grand exception of Eunice, these women are only partially successful in changing the circumstances into which they were born.
In other words, these movies ask a bigger question: Can women subvert societal expectations of gender norms and survive whole and intact?
With its two-part movie structure, “Wicked: Part One” ends with Elphaba finding her voice, embracing her “otherness” as green and being ostracized by the Wizard. We will have to wait until November to see how much power she can exert in exile as the Wicked Witch of the West. Likewise, Ani seems to be caught in an endless exchange of sex for money; her plan to flee the strip club puts her in more physical jeopardy, with no fairytale ending in sight. Finally, as a trans character, Emilia Pérez metamorphoses the most physically, and as a result of her gender-affirming surgery (the movie controversially implies), the most psychologically. But even with that great arc, Emilia’s finality always feels pre-determined by either the sins of her past life or the stereotypical tragedy that often befalls transgressive women, especially trans women, in fiction and real life.
The most subtle and, in many ways, most inspired evolution, however, belongs to the lead character of “I’m Still Here,” Eunice Paiva, who in real life and in the film finds her voice of political resistance after the forced disappearance and murder of her husband, Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello), in January 1971. Not only does Eunice survive a nearly two-week interrogation at a secret military facility, but that trauma also awakens so many instincts in her — as a mother, a wife and a target of political persecution — that she ultimately dedicates herself to raising her five children alone while keeping her husband’s legacy of dissent alive. The movie traces Eunice’s progression by showing her as a lawyer and advocate who witnesses the democratically elected government admit the sins of the former dictatorship and who eventually struggles with dementia at the end of her life.
Political in a different way are “The Substance” characters Elisabeth and Sue, whose deadly bind has led some critics to applaud the film’s feminism, while others have argued that its progressiveness falls flat. In some ways, this debate is partly a by-product of the horror genre, in which the grotesque is expected to be exaggerated; in this case, it manifests as a product of Elisabeth’s severe body dysmorphia. But a more generous read is that this is a case of form imitating theme. In a movie about surface readings, it should be no surprise that its main characters are denied any actual depth. Their flatness is the point.
In this sense, the ending of “The Substance” might better resemble another movie that focuses on the deadly toxicity of the American beauty industry: last summer’s “Skincare,” starring Elizabeth Banks as a famous middle-aged aesthetician who is so paranoid about losing her status and relevancy that she attacks an unsuspecting rival whom she blames for sabotaging her business.
Even though Fargeat’s main characters might lack substance, I found myself following the trajectory of her movies and her obsession with showing the difference between the impossible beauty standards imposed on us and the fatal consequences of embracing that gaze as our own.
“Reality+,” her 2014 short film, follows Vincent as his average self (Vincent Colombe) and in his altered 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, forcing him to run home, Cinderella-like, to avoid detection by a woman he wants to date. Ultimately, Vincent can reject the technology that transforms him into Vincent+ and choose an even better path.
In 2017, Fargeat followed up with “Revenge,” her debut feature that grappled with the effects of patriarchal violence writ large on one woman’s body. Set in a secluded vacation home in the desert, the movie is about Jen (Matilda Lutz), a young aspiring actress who is sexually assaulted and left for dead by a group of men, one of whom she is having an affair with. The ensuing plot is all about Jen’s self-rescue and how she takes back her narrative, her body and her life from those men she once trusted.
“As human beings in general, but especially as women, our body is such an object of discourse, of contemplation, of judgment, of transformation,” Fargeat said in an interview in September, “that it plays a major role in our lives whether we hate it, whether we take care of it, or whether we want to destroy it.” She added that “The Substance” 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 might remain limited, Fargeat, the director, rejects the cinematic male gaze altogether and shows how such a narrative confines our heroines on screen and us as the audience consuming their images.
Her auteurism is the best vindication she could give us. At the young age of 48, she seems to be just getting started.
Salamishah Tillet is the Henry Rutgers Professor of Africana Studies and Creative Writing and the Executive Director of Express Newark, a center for art, design, digital storytelling and social justice at Rutgers University-Newark. Tillet won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism for her work as a contributing critic at large for The New York Times. She is the author of “In Search of the Color Purple: The Story of an American Masterpiece” and the forthcoming “All the Rage: Nina Simone and the World She Made.“
This story first appeared in the Down to the Wire issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
