Producers: Tim Bevan, Coralie Fargeat and Eric Fellner Director: Coralie Fargeat Screenplay: Coralie Fargeat Cast: Demi Moore, Dennis Quaid, Margaret Qualley, Hugo Diego Garcia, Phillip Schurer, Joseph Balderrama, Tom Morton, Robin Greer, Oscar Lesage and Gore Abrams Distributor: Mubi
Grade: B-
Aging’s a bitch in “The Substance,” a black comedy in which French writer-director Coralie Fargeat travels to Cronenberg territory but comes equipped with a blunderbuss rather than the scalpel he wields. The stylistically garish, narratively bombastic satire of obsession with fame doesn’t know when to quit—at nearly two-and-a-half hours, it definitely overstays its welcome—but its wild, snarky tone, more amusingly gross than truly scary, hits the target more often than not.
It begins with Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), an Oscar-winning actress who’s made a later-in-life career as the hostess of a popular TV exercise program, being summarily fired by network boss Harvey (a riotously over-the-top Dennis Quaid) because she’s turned fifty. Despondent despite her long-time star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (its deterioration serves as a recurrent symbol of her career freefall), Elisabeth becomes even glummer when she’s involved in a car crash. She’s not seriously injured, the doctor (Tom Morton) tells her, but that hardly lifts the gloom. There is, however, a curious twist when the attending nurse (Robin Greer) mutters something about her being a perfect candidate as he examines her spine.
The treatment he’s referring to becomes evident soon afterward when she receives an invitation to apply for the titular stuff, which promises a unique sort of rejuvenation. Elisabeth has to go through an elaborate search to secure the kit that contains all the necessary equipment, including a trip to an underground crypt in a seedy section of Los Angeles; and the actual procedure she conducts on herself is equally complicated. But it works, though gruesomely: her back opens up bloodily and a young, beautifully sculpted twenty-year old version of her emerges—Sue (Margaret Qualley), who must sew up the rip along the comatose Elisabeth’s spine.
But as the instructions emphasize, Elisabeth and Sue remain a single person, and the two versions must rotate every seven days without fail to avoid dire results. Sue applies to the network for the position of Elisabeth’s replacement, quickly gets the job, and is an enormous success, much to Harvey’s delight. Indeed, her fitness routine becomes so popular that he names her the host of the network’s live New Years Eve show.
Sue’s new life is extravagant in terms not only of TV stardom but sex. She first has a fling with a handsome, brooding motorcyclist (Oscar Lesage), and later hunky Diego (Hugo Diego Garcia). Meanwhile her dorky neighbor Oscar (Gore Abrams), who’d planned to complain to Elisabeth about the noise, morphs into a hopelessly besotted suitor. Naturally she chafes at being limited to a week at a time, and extends her stays past the deadline.
The effect on the unconscious Elisabeth is horrible: she ages rapidly—her hair grows grey and scraggly, her skin withers, her bones are afflicted with terrible arthritis, her muscles atrophy. When during one of her waking periods she looks into halting the process, she gets the unpleasant news that doing so would leave her permanently as she is. A reckoning of sorts between Elisabeth and Sue is inevitable, and the result at the New Years broadcast is literally monstrous.
It would be an oversimplification to say that Moore’s own career parallels Elisabeth Sparks’s—though she lost leading lady status, she continued to work quite regularly—but its trajectory certainly proves that for many Hollywood actresses, stardom fades with age, and so she’s a good choice here, especially because at sixty she can still convince as the host of a fitness show. She’s terrific in other respects as well, capturing the woman’s vulnerability as well as her desperation; and it can’t have been easy to submit to the demands of Pierre-Olivier Persin’s extensive makeup.
Qualley’s assignment is less demanding: it mostly consists of looking beautiful and alluring, and showing off her physique in lengthy workout routines that are designed, as are many elements in the film, to do two things at once—in this case, to ridicule society’s exploitation of the female form while, paradoxically, exploiting it. It’s a juggling act Fargeat doesn’t always manage to pull off, but she deserves credit for the attempt.
Equally audacious is the film’s visual approach, with the brazen flashiness of Benjamin Kracun’s ultra-bright widescreen cinematography accentuated by bizarre touches—oddball camera angles, fish-eyed lenses and the like—that play off the flamboyance of Stanislas Reydellet’s production design (Elisabeth’s apartment has a huge living room with a magnificent view, as well as a brilliantly white bathroom as large as one in Grand Central Station) and Emmanuelle Youchnovski’s costumes (Quaid’s absurdly colorful suit are exceeded only by the wildness of his performance). By contrast the editing by Fargeat, Jerome Eltabet and Valentin Féron is mostly leisurely (sometimes excessively so), allowing the scenes to register without rushing. Raffertie’s score, however, frequently bellows.
One genuinely clever moment in the movie will especially appeal to movie buffs. It comes near the close, when the grotesque form Elisabeth/Sue has taken attempts to primp in front of a mirror before going on the New Years broadcast and a brief snatch from Bernard Herrmann’s luxurious score for “Vertigo,” the ultimate transformation film, pops up on the soundtrack. It’s a rare bit of understated humor in a movie that really doesn’t know either the meaning of subtlety or when enough is enough, but offers enough spikily unsettling moments amid the gaudiness to satisfy adventurous viewers.