Fresh lipstick smudged in a crimson scream. A ripple of pupils staring back in the mirror. Sun-kissed starlets bathed in blood. Severed spinal cords crudely stapled back together like a button-up blouse. Bodies filled with chicken bones. High-end lofts housing hidden skeletons. Luminous daggers. Pink pleated patsies. Rotting limbs. Devious doppelgangers. White teeth tycoons. Sharp-dressed shackles. Makeup-puffed mutants. Thinly veiled vultures. Crashed convertibles painted across the Walk of Fame. A twin standing solo at the end of a long hallway, haunted by herself. This is Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, and with its release, the French writer/director is freeing her inner monster on the world. “When I started to write the film after Revenge, I had passed my 40s, I was going towards my 50s,” director Fargeat tells me as we sit down to talk. “I really started to have those crazy thoughts that, okay, now it’s going to be the end of my life. I’m not going to be of interest to anyone, no one is going to value me anymore. Like, that’s really the end.” Feeling trapped by the notion that her usefulness has a shelf life, the filmmaker fought back fiercely against the status quo by channeling her fears into a surreal takedown of societal beauty standards. “When I took a step back, I’m thinking how crazy and absurd. I’m not even at half of my life, and I’m led to think that in such a powerful way, that really is so strong and so violent. I said, okay, I need to do something with that.” Starring Demi Moore as Elisabeth Sparkle, a fading actress with years of highly sought-after aerobicize videos under her belt, the character strikes a familiar chord when she is rewarded for another trip around the sun with a prompt firing and a warm fare-thee-well by her egotistical boss, Harvey (played by a shockingly sinister Dennis Quaid). In between grotesque close-up shots of shrimp-stained teeth, Harvey calmly informs his former prodigy that, “People always ask for something new, and at 50, it stops.” The scene is eerily reminiscent of another moment from Fargeat’s first feature, Revenge, when a negligent Roberto (Jean-Louis Tribes) casually stuffs his face with chocolate candy and turns his back on a woman in need. “I love to work with symbolism,” the director muses. “So these extreme close-ups of a mouth crushing something violently is the best representation that I can think of visually and centrally of the violence that I think society is still doing to women. Crushing them in many, many ways.” Cast out from her place of business and contemplating her future from her towering loft overlooking the city, Elisabeth considers the tattered remnants of a billboard that once displayed her face. A life led by ambition meant choosing career over community, and the muted cavernous walls she calls home engulf her in a sea of solitude and tepid reflection. Just when it seems that all hope is lost, a black market drug simply called “The Substance” offers a light at the end of the tunnel. A cell-replicating solution, this experimental procedure promises to create a younger, better version of herself, one that can reclaim what Elisabeth feels has been lost to the hands of time. Accepting the Faustian bargain, Elisabeth injects herself with the neon green chemical, and Margaret Qualley’s “Sue” is birthed out of the small of her back. “I remember that the first scene that I started to write, even before I had the rest of the story, or where it was going to happen, was the transformation scene,” Fargeat remembers. “It’s the powerful idea that I know is going to be the heart of the film, and the point where everything else is going to build around. I knew it was a very special scene, that I think is the spinal cord of the movie and its deep DNA.” The rules for using The Substance are as follows: 1) You must switch bodies every seven days, without fail. For seven days of the week, Elisabeth lays lifeless on the floor while her mind inhabits the younger body of Sue, who is quickly hired by Harvey to replace her older self as the new star of a revamped aerobics class. 2) When you are in your younger self’s body, you must inject yourself with a stabilizer fluid that is excreted from your original body’s spine. 3) You cannot forget that both versions of you are the same person – you are one. You cannot escape yourself. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, rule number 4) You must respect the balance. Although these boundaries are respected at first, it’s not long before Sue begins taking over the timeline, extracting spinal fluid from her former self like she’s lapping water from a stream that dissolves before her very eyes. The more time she spends in Sue’s body, the more her newer self eats away at her true identity. The consequences are devastating. “The idea of the two selves are almost more like a reincarnation, or say, the expression of the different voices that we have within ourselves,” states director Fargeat. “Sue is really the representation of that other voice that is basically the way you judge yourself, that can be very harsh. It was really the idea that even though you can think something, and believe something, when you have one body, if you live in a totally different body, your way of thinking is going to change. Your relation to people is going to change. Your way of seeing the world is going to change. So, that was really what led to having the character become more and more apart, because their way of experiencing the world is more and more different, because their bodies become different, and this imprints their mind whether they want it to or not.” Adds the filmmaker, “I think they really represent the different voices that we have within us, and that can be so violent and so conflictual.” On the days when she’s stuck in her naturally born body, Elisabeth does nothing but sit around and wait to be Sue again. Stationary in her recliner, Elisabeth watches playback of Sue on various talk shows, on her new workout program, on commercials announcing her big New Year’s bash. Like a bottomless pit, Elisabeth gouges on greasy food, tossing wrappers on the floor, soiling the carpet with crusty poultry cadavers. She eats and eats, but is never full. There’s a hunger in her that will never be filled, an emptiness that dresses up well for the camera, where a lack of willpower can be called stardom. The idea of endless consumption runs rampant in much of Fargeat’s work, and it is on full display in her latest endeavor. “By using the strong symbolic images that represent behavior, that represents social trends, that represents social organization, I put it in a very visceral and visual way to embody all the violence, all the grossness, all the general wrong behaviors that are still very much around,” explains Fargeat. “I love to put them in a very visual form, which I think is the one that hits us immediately. You can let yourself be eaten up by the outside world. It’s hard not to feel consumed.” Whereas her 2017 standout thriller Revenge highlighted the ways in which women constantly deal with the threat of external violence, The Substance focuses more on internal violence, using her movie like a mirror to show how women are at war with their own bodies. Remarks Fargeat, “I knew that it was going to be a more challenging film, because it’s more about an internal violence that you keep within yourself, but Revenge gave me the strength to feel at ease enough with my filmmaking, and who I was as a director, to feel that it was the right time for me to address this. That I could do something powerful with it, and make my vision in the service of this really violent, powerful theme that I wanted to take out in the world.” In figuring out how to ground her story, Fargeat compares the experience to “polishing a diamond,” where one must “take all of the dust of things that don’t belong to the story, to just keep what is, crafting the story in the way that you need for this specific movie.” Once the filmmaker realized that she would be commenting on her internal dialogue by way of surface-level perceptions, she knew exactly who to center her story around: a Tinseltown A-lister. “I was thinking, who could be the ideal character for me to tell that story? Who represents the best symbol of the fear that every woman has to live with, that her value depends on how people look at her? And that’s where I thought about the figure of the actress, who is the one for whom it’s highlighted, because she puts herself in front of the camera, in front of the eye of the public to get her value.” Continues Fargeat, “After that, I said, okay, what’s the heightened symbol of an actress who could represent this, and speak to the whole world? That’s where the Hollywood idea came, because it’s such a symbol in itself, of this idea that if you’re beautiful and the perfect woman, you’re going to be loved, you’re going to be acclaimed, you’re going to be worshiped — which builds this relationship between what we think we have to conform to, to get value.” Although the exact location of the film is “never specified,” the director recognizes that the familiarity of a place like Los Angeles, a bubble of a “world that worships beauty and perfection,” plays as the “perfect representation” of the message that she hopes to get across. A very visual filmmaker, Fargeat admits she cares less about dialogue and more about giving her audience an “immersive” and “sensorial” experience. Given this line in the sand, it comes as a bit of a shock that when casting the two leads who would play the opposite ends of the same person, the director cared less about finding women who looked alike, and more about the energy shared between actresses. “I didn’t want to link them in a way that would be superficial,” says Fargeat, “That they’re going to mimic the same — because that was not really what I was interested in.” In order to highlight the girls’ connective tissue, Fargeat prepped the actors separately and limited their time together to mostly the moments seen on screen. “There was this powerful energy of the two of them, which was reunited on set, and then something special was created. But to me, it was important to preserve that for the shooting moments, and not have them get used up during prep. To really keep it, to deliver on screen.” Sourcing that special sense of continuity was not easy, but Fargeat found the perfect Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley. “They have a common raw animal energy,” smiles Fargeat. “I think they’re both very instinctive actresses, they both have a very strong intuition. I think they are both very interested in making their bodies a real performance tool. Margaret is a dancer, and Demi has worked so much around the physicality of everything she did in her films. Intuitively, that links them together in a very strong way, much more than what a true resemblance could bring.” Obsessed with the violence behind the beauty, Fargeat uses the bubble gum aesthetic of her hyper-feminized leading ladies to hint at the darkness that lurks just underneath. The body horror hides behind rows of pearly whites, and only two actors as versatile as these could elicit such strong reactions from audiences as Fargeat is so interested in instigating. “I like the fact that they don’t totally look alike, that they have their own way of investing in the world and reacting to it, because I think that’s what the film is about,” Fargeat comments about her unique doppelgangers. “There was just a great alchemy between the two of them, and this is something that happens for mysterious reasons that you can’t explain.”
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