The only thing I find more shamelessly gratifying to indulge my sight with than a gorgeous brunette Hollywood sexpot-star actress from the 80s is static framing.
Visually, The Substance (2024, Coralie Fargeat) boasts a unified graphic adherence to bold, clean, meticulously art-directed powerful images that are as forebodingly sterile as a Kubrick bathroom. Why in the first scene does ELISABETH SPARKLE go into a bathroom that’s a replica of the Overlook bathroom? Who cares?
The Substance is a work of style. Art is style. And art works best when neither its maker nor its viewer attempt to process it through their intellect. On a superficial level, The Substance continuously kept me in awe of all its locked-off static frames, poised staging of long takes, symmetry, single-point perspective, center-framed inserts and hideously ravishing still lifes. And its setting is pretty much confined to Elisabeth Sparkle’s condo, which heightens a sense of her emotional isolation in life. I can’t get enough of that white-tiled bathroom or the dark purgatory room she builds inside it—very much expressionistic of her own psyche. And if that’s the case, her view of L.A. outside that giant window with the billboard of her is everything fake, her imagination, the uh stuff that dreams are made of.
But of course there are several aggressively jolting quick cut, montage chop, impressionistically Mickey Mousing cued music video style sequences interspersed throughout. I hate to make comparisons, but I’ll limit myself to this exception: there’s a lot of Jonas Åkerlund feel to all of this. And I love it. It all leads to this notion I’ve always had of movies not being real life. Like the exercise show hosted by SUE, if she’s wearing the same oufit, doing the same moves, to the same song, why film new episodes every week? When a movie can become something that doesn’t let itself be hampered by the logic of real life is when art flourishes.
Thematically, what is The Substance about? I don’t know. I’m not gonna throw around any lazy worthless terms like male gaze, or standards of beauty. Those aren’t themes. They’re pseudo academic critic garbage. This movie used a language of emotions to get me to feel an empathy conveyed without changing the way I think; even better, it changed the way I feel. (And that is real life.)
There’s nothing new about the themes in this movie. But it still utilizes them in the process of forming something fresh. And like Gremlins (1984, Joe Dante), it knows the audience loves a set of rules at the beginning, especially because they know by the end they’ll all be broken, and we’ll all be confronted with our worst fears. Because what more is a morality tale than that?
09/21/2024 AMC Phipps Plaza 14
Atlanta, GA
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