You’ve probably already heard of “The substance”a film starring Demi Moore that won the Best Screenplay Award at the last Cannes festival. The appetite of the French competition for ultraviolent allegories about the objectification of the female body or the tyranny of the image through the subgenre of body horror is curious: there are noisy and stimulating precedents such as “Neon Demon” o “Titanium”also seen in Sitges, an a priori more natural habitat for this type of proposals.
The last tape Coralie Fargeatwhich already won the Best Direction Award in Sitges 2017 with the notable “Revenge”is a bloody satire on the heteropatriarchal dictatorship of entertainment and its exclusive aesthetic canons, which relegate to ostracism all those women who do not conform to the required age and measurements. One of these victims subjugated by the impossible prevailing canons has in “The substance” the features of an exultant Demi Moore, who here plays a Hollywood actress on a tightrope to whom the industry is beginning to turn its back.
It is advisable not to reveal much of a story divided into three unequal chapters but interrelated down to the last atom and whose one hundred and forty minutes flow like hemoglobin: in torrents. A powerful visual artifact in which Fargeat invokes the most explicit Cronenberg, in a game of mirrors between beauty and monstrosity that inevitably brings a smile – and nausea – from the viewer.
The absurdity and hyperbole work, that is nothing new, but the nerve and freshness of the director behind the camera is. The Frenchwoman loves bright colors and portrays shiny lycra and the most unbridled gore with surgical clarity. Along the way, a good dose of impossible shots parade, such as those starring a cartoonish and repulsive Dennis Quaid, or the homages and cinephile winks, of “The Shining” y “Carrie” a “The fly” y “Eraserhead”.
But if something stands out in “The substance” are its two main actresses: a Margaret Qualley who continues to rise like foam after her alliance with the most recent Lanthimos and, especially, a Demi Moore revalued thanks to a double merit: that of a stark performance – never better said – and without network, fed in turn by the extra-filmic meaning of the role itself; a brave choice with which the actress seems to punch the table of many industry moguls whose jaws have unhinged watching the film.
