The Oscar for Best Actress is a two-horse race between Demi Moore and Mikey Madison. One stars in a tragic, comic, indie masterpiece about a woman offered a chance to assert her worth and wrest back control of her life from more powerful men which backfires, brutally, and ends with a climax so sad, grotesque and humiliating you are forced to look away. The other stars in The Substance.
Anora and The Substance are both films exploring the ways women are seen by the world but seem, at first, to be very different. The former, Sean Baker’s exquisitely profane Cinderella farce about a Brooklyn dancer who falls into a whirlwind marriage with a young oligarch, is set between the unglamorous worlds of strip clubs, Eastern European enclaves and Vegas mega casinos – worlds of gangsters and cocaine and vulgar excess.
Ani is not easily seduced. She is canny, business-minded, immune to the transitory charms of wealthy clients and expert in manoeuvring their lust for her own gain. Still, when the obnoxious Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn) hires her as his girlfriend for the week, she allows herself to believe her luck may be changing, that she deserves it, and – even worse – that her superior wit, street smarts and the access she presents to a green card give her equal power in the transaction. When his parents and their henchmen find out about it, the race is on to annul the marriage and put Anora back in her place.
Coralie Fargeat’s film, by contrast, is a visceral and provocative body horror, but it, too, is the story of a woman whose destiny is dictated by the desires of men. Actress-turned-TV fitness guru Elisabeth Sparkle lives in a vast hi-rise apartment decorated with enormous mirrors and gigantic posters of herself overlooking a sterile Los Angeles frozen in the 80s.
After she is put out to pasture by sexist network executives in pursuit of someone younger and more pneumatic, a mysterious drug offers her the chance to prolong her career by creating a taut, nubile body replica, Sue (played by Margaret Qualley). But when she stays in that body too long, the original grows into a deformed, bulging monster.
The Substance is a blunt, bad-taste satire of misogyny, ageism, and the consequences of impossible beauty standards. It’s heavy-handed and deliberate with its extreme concept and on-the-nose Hollywood critique. Every overblown frame reminds us that women are at the mercy of men and can do nothing to stop becoming invisible.
I enjoyed it enormously, especially the gore: the stitching together of thick folds of flesh up Sparkle’s spine, Dennis Quaid’s horrible TV boss Harvey (subtle) spitting and crunching a plate of shrimp, the sweaty, oozing monster vomiting up a breast still attached to its innards by some kind of umbilical cord.
But however bold it is to turn the world’s very real, very present problems – ones experienced by its own 61-year-old star – into a silly, trashy horror film, the incessant gore ultimately makes ageing itself appear repulsive. It is intended as a feminist film. But it does little more than state the obvious and try to shock us with it over and over until its leading woman literally explodes into a puddle of gunge. Anora does something greater: it exposes the raw, complicated truth about women’s entrapment and allows us to recognise ourselves in it.
We know Anora will never get a happy ending, but we hope she may at least come away from the Vanya caper unscathed. But in the final scene, when the kindliest of her captors (Igor, played by the Oscar nominated Yuri Borisov) returns her wedding ring and money promised to her, the only way she knows how to thank him is to have sex with him – crying.
It is a devastating close to a portrait, painted with such dignity and humility, of a scrappy heroine who tries not to fall victim to how men perceive and underestimate her, but does. It may not call itself “feminist” but its uncomfortable honesty lingers long after The Substance’s gore and gunge is washed away and forgotten.
Comments
Leave a Comment