Over on the social media there has, in recent weeks, been some absurd debate about whether Gal Gadot, as an actor of generally pleasing aspect, is suitable casting for the wicked queen in Disney’s upcoming live-action remake of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The objectors seem to have forgotten that, if we read her mirror’s judgments correctly, the queen is, most likely, still the second fairest of them all. In appearance at least, Gadot seems to meet the brief.
All kinds of comparisons present themselves during Coralie Fargeat’s monstrous growl at the inhumanity of society’s response to the ageing process. Sunset Boulevard is certainly on the table. Whisps of Dorian Gray are everywhere about. Dr Jekyll and his sullen pal would recognise the twin protagonists’ logistical dilemma. But Snow White is at least as interesting a model. Here the wicked queen, in the defiant form of Demi Moore, delivers her own Snow White from damp innards and sets out to live vicariously through that creation’s selfish youth. Of course Moore still looks fabulous. That’s the point. She lives in a society – a shamelessly heightened distortion of Hollywood – where no amount of ageing well can compensate for the commissars’ enslavement to the calendar.
Nothing here is real. Fargeat, director of the fine 2017 thriller Revenge, is not pretending otherwise. It is as if the risen Brothers Grimm were taking a crack at the contemporary entertainment industry. Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle (a name from 1970s glam rock), the hugely popular star of a TV aerobics show that, in what passes for the real world, would bring nobody this level of fame. As she crests 50 it looks as if she is destined for the scrap heap, but a chance encounter with a young nurse alerts her to an elixir called the Substance. Fargeat’s script asks quite a bit of the viewer here. After injection, a younger version of Elisabeth emerges slimily and, looking just like Margaret Qualley, makes her way out to the appreciative streets. Now called Sue, she is soon the adored sensation that Elisabeth once was.
Here’s the rub. The older character does not find her consciousness inhabiting the younger. Each now spends seven days in a coma and seven days in the world. It doesn’t seem much of a deal for Elisabeth, but we can, perhaps, buy that even a proxy hold on eternal beauty beats the alternative. (Oh, add H Rider Haggard’s She to the list of influences above.) Inevitably, Sue starts to cheat on the deal and Elisabeth finds decay setting in again.
Few films have, this century, caused such a splash at Cannes film festival. Playing in competition, The Substance generated such an explosion of celebration that those unconvinced scarcely dared boo. A large part of that excitement was, surely, down to the spectacularly disgusting body horror that squelches up the closing half-hour (or more). Some felt, not unreasonably, that the hyperbolic exaggerations of female ageing felt actively misogynistic, but those scenes – organs plopping off like over-ripe fruit – can also be read as a defiant, two-finger rebuke to temporal fascists. The film is ramming mortal reality in the face of the illusion industry.
There are also moments of subtlety here. A scene at the centre that finds Elisabeth, after settling on a low-stakes date, furiously doing and redoing make-up in an unhelpful mirror speaks poignantly to how society imposes insecurity on even the most well preserved. For the most part, however, The Substance is an exercise in Grand Guignol of the most unforgiving school, a hugely entertaining spasm that favours full-frontal attack, rather than commando raids, on the targets of its incensed satire. You won’t be bored.
The Substance is in cinemas from Friday, September 20th
