The Substance
At this point in the Cannes film festival, half of the competition movies have already premiered which means that it’s time for a certain kind of audience participation. If you’ve subjected viewers to six days of some of the most punishing cinema on earth, and then suddenly give them a stylishly funny (but still plenty thinky) horror movie where Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley are forced to share one body, and there are lots of cool shots and also an electronic score that sounds like if you gave a drum machine an anxiety disorder, and also some skin (okay, no small amount of skin) and also a special thanks credit to all the extras who got covered in blood, they tend to lose their shit. I expect that in three months time people will say Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance” was overhyped at Cannes. But what do I care? I’m here. Let’s do this.
Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle, a former movie star who has aged into being an aerobics queen. And now she’s aging out of that too, according to her grotesque pig boss Harvey (Dennis Quaid), whom we meet in some supremely unflattering wide angles. Even before we meet Elisabeth proper her career trajectory is conveyed with pointed wit through a montage showing us her Hollywood Walk of Fame star being laid, dedicated, ravaged by time until someone finally splatters it with ketchup.
After a car accident, Elisabeth finds out about “the substance.” It unlocks DNA. It divides cells. (The latter process is illustrated using egg yolk; it’s the first thing you see in the movie actually so much so that for a second you might think it’s the production company logo.) She will be split in two: herself and another self that should be better than herself. Only catch is she’ll have to switch bodies every seven days no cheating.
Preparing for her first injection is a really good scene. The substance comes in various packets and medical supplies, with sparse instructions (though they are helpful, in all-caps) and Moore’s character has to figure it out herself. And the transformation as Elisabeth stands nude in a white tiled bathroom and feels her eye double in its socket, her spinal column opening to give birth is genuinely inventive. Elisabeth’s double comes out and looks at herself in the mirror but instead of Moore staring back at us it’s Qualley. This time Qualley plays Sue, who almost immediately auditions to be Elisabeth’s replacement on the aerobics show.
“The Substance” could be criticized as being unoriginal. The deferred aging idea is as old as “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” and the body-horror effects are very David Cronenberg, who has his own new film, “The Shrouds,” premiering at Cannes tomorrow. But “The Substance” does psychology and metaphor in its own way. (There are so many menstrual analogies the calendaring of the body swaps, the bleeding at inconvenient times.)
Fargeat’s last film, “Revenge,” was mainly notable for an incredibly extended cat and mouse chase through a house near the end; but “The Substance” lets her paint (with blood) on a much larger canvas. And while Qualley has shown real facility with smiley malevolence before (in this festival, no less), Moore has never gotten to do anything like this. The only thing that makes sense is for the Cannes jury to give them a shared best actress prize and make them mail it back and forth to each other every week.
For a softer, earthier tale of female friendship, the parallel festival Directors’ Fortnight offered up a new movie by Patricia Mazuy, a French filmmaker who really ought to be better known in America. (She hasn’t had great luck with U.S. distribution, but Film at Lincoln Center hosted a mini retrospective in 2019.) In the early ’90s, Mazuy directed an episode of “All the Boys and Girls of Their Time,” the iconic eight part TV series that also yielded one of Claire Denis’s strongest movies and Olivier Assayas’s “Cold Water.” Mazuy’s most recent feature, “Saturn Bowling,” took an out there plot detective on trail of serial killer doesn’t know killer is half brother and turned it into what read as serious critique of violence and masculinity.
“Visiting Hours,” starring Isabelle Huppert and Hafsia Herzi, is the most straightforward of the Mazuy films I’ve seen. Alma (Huppert) and Mina (Herzi) meet at a prison in Bordeaux where both their husbands are incarcerated. Alma steps in when an officer tells Mina who has traveled a long way to get there that she’ll have to come back tomorrow. Soon enough, Alma is making arrangements for Mina and her kids to move in with her, and for Mina to take a job in the laundry room of her husband’s clinic.
Their connection is based on candor. In the ice breaking stage of meeting people, outgoing Alma makes a habit of telling them up front what her husband did just so they can get past it. Mazuy said in the Q&A that one of her aims was to show off a light side of Huppert that isn’t often seen on screen. But Mazuy’s film is also concerned with probing the limits of generosity and loyalty. Try as they might to live together Alma jokes that she’s Mina’s “bourgeois pal” each woman has aspects of her life that escape the other’s full or clear perception. “Visiting Hours” is broad-mindedly gentle but keenly judged and sternly tenderhearted about its subtleties.
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