The Substance
By K.G. Kline
All you need is youth Coralie Fargeat's new film, "The Substance", is a frustrating film. Only men will see it. Only women will understand it. Fargeat's bloody body drama is clearly aimed for a female audience that understands what it means to be aging.
Unfortunately, the promise of seeing Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley in the nude seems to be the draw. Fargeat should be commended for taking on a heavy subject. The mixture of beauty, fame, and women aging doesn't get the coverage it deserves. It's not a new subject. Oscar Wilde wrote about aging in his classic 1890's story "The Picture of Dorian Gray", but that was at a time when men were the protagonists. Think of "The Substance" as "Dorian Gray" meets "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", from a woman's point of view. The story centers on Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a 60-year-pld Oscar-winning movie star who moved on to hosting an aerobics show As the film opens she has just been fired due to her age. Sparkle is a woman whose looks have always opened doors.
Without a husband, children, or a family, her body and beauty are everything she has. Moore is perfectly cast, and not afraid to appear minus makeup. Men are filling the seats for the chance to see Moore naked in front of a mirror. Women are seeing something completely different - the lines on her face, her sagging breasts, her flat buttocks (Moore uses no prosthetics in that scene). This is the reaction Fargeat is trying to achieve. Moore is still quite beautiful, but she hasn't escaped the signs of turning 60. The toll time has taken on her is the film's foundation. Young women know this is coming. Older women have seen it happen.
Demi Moore makes the scene provocative and subtly threatening, more dangerous than any alien creature or evil slasher in a hockey mask. Elizabeth Sparkle is a warning, much like Ceasar riding triumphantly into Rome while a servant whispers into his ear "All glory is fleece." The film turns science fiction when Sparkle is offered a drug (well, several drugs) called The Substance, which will generate a new, younger version of herself (Margaret Qualley in an equally brave and slightly lunatic performance). The new body wakes on a biweekly schedule. Sparkle gets to live seven days as her younger self, then seven days in her old body, perpetually, as long as both continue to follow a rigorous intravenous exchange of body fluids without fail. It's not clear who the creator of the drug is, or why they offered it to her free of charge, but the science isn't the point here.
This is not a plot-driven film so much as a slow body image burn. The two versions share a common mind - sort of. Problems begin when the younger version, named only "Sue", gets Sparkle's old TV show, and at the urging of its sleezy producer, turns it into soft core porn. Sparkle was Jane Fonda in a leotard. Sue is Elizabeth Berkley in "Showgirls." When Sparkle wakes up she finds her apartment turned into a sex pad by Sue. When Sue wakes up she finds it looking like a trashed cooking show. Posters of a leotard-clad Sparkle come down while billboards of a nearly naked Sue go up, as the media indulges its newest beauty queen and casts aside its aging actress.
Soon one can't live in the other's debris field, despite the drug creator's urging that they "are one." It's best not to rely too much on plausibility or science, when watching "The Substance." It's all just filler to tie the important stuff together. The men are merely caricatures of every sleezy guy in Hollywood. Only the women matter here. So, what did I mean when I said earlier "Only women will understand it"? When a woman stands up a date with a man well below her status, men will identify with the man. Women will identify with the woman. When a woman covers her face with concealer, a man sees her trying to look nice. To a woman it means a lot more.
When a beautiful woman goes out wearing heavy makeup and big D&G sunglasses, to a man she's trying to look like a movie star. To a woman, she's hiding something. Fargeat has filled The Substance with cues that only women will pick up. They're spread throughout the film like a mine field. Each one packs a wallop. Ignore the fact that this film has more gushing blood than any slasher film in the last ten years (there's an apology in the credits to the extras who got sprayed).
Ignore the prosthetics and creature effects at the end. When you peel back the latex there's nothing campy going on here. Fame is too painful to be camp. The fleeting nature of beauty too predestined to be taken lightly. The posters and Hollywood Walk-Of-Fame stars too hard a reminder that in the entertainment industry men and women are on very different career timelines. The film's last scene sums it up well
