Old Yorker

  • I’m Still Here

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ainda Estou Aqui

    Walter Salles (2024)

    Marcelo Rubens Paiva is a Brazilian playwright, screenwriter and novelist.  He’s also a memoirist whose autobiographical works include I’m Still Here; published in 2015, the book is chiefly about his relationships with his parents, especially his mother, Eunice.  Marcelo’s father, Rubens Paiva (1929-71), was a civil engineer, a leftist politician and, after leaving office, a political activist.  A vigorous opponent of the military dictatorship that had ruled Brazil since 1964, he was ‘disappeared’ in January 1971.  The book (which I’ve not read) sounds to be, then, a family memoir with an inescapable political context; Walter Salles, working with a screenplay by Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega, successfully integrates those two elements in the film of I’m Still Here.  It’s more vital and inventive as familial rather than political drama but Salles’ screen adaptation may thereby be essentially faithful to its source material.  Eunice Paiva, thanks to the screen time given her and to Fernanda Torres’ fine acting, is unquestionably the story’s heart and heroine.

    Marcelo isn’t the narrator or the central consciousness of the film.  For most of it, he’s an eleven-year-old, who stands out only because he’s the one boy among his parents’ five children.  The family lives a busy, jolly, materially comfortable life in Rio de Janeiro.  Their spacious house is close to Leblon beach, which is where Salles introduces Eunice and the children, swimming and playing in the sun.  Marcelo (Guilherme Silveira) decides he wants to adopt a stray dog – a little mongrel terrier – that keeps appearing on the beach.  He runs back to the house, dog in arms, to seal the deal with his father.  Rubens (Selton Mello), in his home office, is discussing with a business associate (Dan Stulbach) the new building project they’re planning.  Rubens’ instant reaction to the dog is a definite no; this is quickly followed, as his son pleads, by ‘What does your mother say?’.  Almost as soon as Marcelo fibs that she said, ‘Ask your father’, he gets his way.

    This scene gives a good flavour of how things work in the Paiva household.  There’s a kind of Godfather-lite contrast between Rubens in his professional and political roles, and as a funny, loving husband and father – lite not just because Rubens is no crime boss but also because he, as paterfamilias, and his wife, as homemaker and social hostess, seem reasonably equal, as well as mutually adoring, partners.  The contrast will nevertheless return and register strongly once Rubens has gone and Eunice learns things she didn’t previously know about the extent of his and his friends’ communication with enemies of the military regime and campaigns on behalf of its victims (mostly through coverage in liberal newspapers outside Brazil).  In the meantime, Salles does a very good job of developing domestic texture.  None of the three younger sisters – Eliana (Luisa Kozovski), Nalu (Barbara Luz) and Babiu (Cora Mora) – makes a strong individual impression but the mixture of details of what the couple or their kids enjoy – backgammon, soufflés, European pop music – is random enough to feel real.

    The pop music is sometimes used as a bridge between the narrative’s two aspects.  One of the records played by the Paiva girls on the turntable at home is ‘Je t’aime … moi non plus’, banned from radio play in Brazil at the time – as it was in Britain, too.  Otherwise, Salles sharply distinguishes the two countries.   Far-left revolutionary activists kidnap the Swiss ambassador to Brazil, holding him hostage in exchange for the government’s release of political prisoners; in the immediate aftermath to the kidnap, Vera (Valentina Herszage), the eldest Paiva daughter, along with her boyfriend, is arrested at a police roadblock, where they’re subjected to verbally and physically rough treatment.  Soon afterwards, Rubens and Eunice agree to Vera’s going to London for a while, in the company of two of their friends, a married couple who will live in England in virtual political exile.  Vera’s not in the same boat.  Her parents think the extended trip will be an education for their daughter.  But the photos and videos she sends home – in which Abbey Road and its zebra crossing feature prominently – remind us of Vera’s enthusiastic use of her camcorder in Rio.  This was part of what attracted attention and suspicion at the roadblock.

    The bulk of I’m Still Here‘s action takes place in late 1970 and early 1971, exactly the timeframe of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018).  Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro are several thousand miles apart but that’s still an interesting coincidence – at least for British arthouse audiences more used to seeing screen depictions of have-nots in Mexican and Brazilian society, rather than the middle-class families on which Roma and I’m Still Here focus.  Each of the two films depicts, though to very different degrees, a family’s relation to the political reality of their country in the early 1970s.  Whereas Cuarón’s quasi-autobiographical Roma presents the family’s lives chiefly from the perspective of one of their maids, the Paivas’ housekeeper, Zezé (Pri Helena), is a relatively minor presence in I’m Still Here.  She exits the film soon after Rubens’ disappearance:  without her husband’s salary, Eunice can no longer afford to keep Zezé on.  The roadblock is the only episode in the early stages that sees a dramatic collision between a family member and the regime but the latter is always there as a threat.  This comes through in Rubens and Eunice’s conversations with their friends and in isolated sights and sounds.  At the very start, when Eunice is swimming in the sea, she’s disturbed by the noise of a helicopter circling overhead.  A little later, in the background of a street scene, a military truck passes by.  This should be even less remarkable than the helicopter but Eunice notices it uneasily.

    Although you know it’s coming, Rubens’ abduction is a shock – not least because of Salles’ understated staging.   Eunice and Rubens are chatting over a game of backgammon when Zezé enters the room, followed by a man (Luiz Bertazzo) who introduces himself as Dr Schneider; other, armed strangers are visible in the entrance hall.  Asking Rubens to accompany these men immediately to ‘give a deposition’, Schneider addresses him as ‘Congressman’; Rubens says there’s been some mistake – that he’s not been in Congress for some years[1].  Schneider says there’s no mistake but, while Rubens goes to get changed, assures Eunice that her husband will return home soon.  Schneider and a couple of the other men stay in the house once Rubens has been taken away.  The next few sequences capture the crazy, devastating change that has suddenly occurred in Eunice and her family’s lives.  A good hostess to her fingertips, Eunice offers her unexpected guests refreshments.  When she asks Schneider who he is exactly, he replies that he’s a parapsychologist; Eunice quietly repeats the word ‘parapsychologist’ as an incredulous question; the exchange seems to sum up the absurdity of what’s happening.  Late in the evening, she hears from downstairs the noise of table football.  A few days earlier, Marcelo had been playing it with his father; now his opponent is one of Schneider’s sidekicks.

    Within twenty-four hours, Rubens hasn’t returned but Eunice and Eliana, the second eldest daughter, have also been arrested.  Shortly before arrival at their destination, they’re made to wear hoods, which aren’t removed until the pair have been put in separate cells.  Salles understandably feels obliged to cover this traumatic part of Eunice Paiva’s story but it’s hard for these carceral scenes to avoid seeming, beside what’s gone before, relatively generic – even though Fernanda Torres’ reactions to her character’s ordeal are unfailingly true and strong.  The repeated interrogations, the awful sounds of torture going on elsewhere in the place, Eunice’s keeping count of her days in detention by scratching lines on the cell wall – these are all tropes if not cliches of prison drama.  In fact, I‘m Still Here seems to lose something from this point onwards – perhaps as a consequence of converting Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s book from a first-person narrative to a more objective form of storytelling:  Salles doesn’t even try to convey a sense of Marcelo’s, or any of his siblings’, horror at the disappearance of their father – and, for what must have seemed to the children a frighteningly long time, of their mother, too.

    There are still surprising and effective moments.  When Félix (Humberto Carrão), the Paivas’ journalist friend and her husband’s co-activist, tells Eunice that, even though they know Rubens has been murdered, ‘we have to keep asking for his release, as if we didn’t know what happened to him’.  When, after Vera’s return from England, another journalist and a photographer arrive at the house to take a picture of Eunice and her children:  the moment they’re instructed to look sad for the photo, they all burst out laughing before compromising on a smile.  Other details, though poignant, are more predictable.  The dog the family adopted dies in the street outside, under the wheels of a car whose occupants are spying on the Paiva house.  Eunice starts sorting through things ahead of the family’s move to São Paulo, where her own parents live, and finds, in a matchbox left in his study by her cigar-smoking husband, their youngest daughter’s milk tooth.  It fell out early in the story; Rubens and Babiu buried it on the beach only for him to pocket the tooth surreptitiously and keep it as a memento.

    The narrative then switches to São Paulo and moves forward to 1996, when Brazil is once again a democracy.  Eunice now has a law degree (she graduated in her late forties) and is a recognised expert in the rights of Indigenous Peoples in Brazil.  She’s midway through a lecture on the subject when she’s called away to take an urgent phone call, from which she learns that, twenty-five years after his killing, the state is now releasing Rubens’ official death certificate.  She’s accompanied to the government building, to collect the certificate, by Babiu (Olivia Torres) and Marcelo (Antonio Saboia).  Now in his late thirties, Marcelo is in a wheelchair, a published author and something of a celebrity:  in the government offices, a young woman employee asks him to autograph her copy of his memoir, Happy Old Year[2].  This part of I’m Still Here seems designed chiefly to impart what-happened-next information about Eunice and Marcelo.  It’s distinguished by the excellent ageing make-up for Eunice (by Marisa Amenta and others) and by Fernanda Torres’ admirably unshowy means of showing the passage of time in Eunice’s gait and gestures.

    Throughout the film, Fernanda Torres, who magnetises the camera, combines emotional depth and subtlety to a degree that puts her performance in a different (higher!) class from those of her fellow nominees for this year’s Best Actress Oscar.  There’s a persuasive logic to her strongly internalised acting:  as the Rio de Janeiro part of the story progresses, Eunice Paiva is increasingly a woman compelled, for various reasons, to hide her feelings as much as she can express them.  Selton Mello (despite his rather unnerving resemblance to Benny Hill) complements her beautifully as Rubens, with his life-and-soul-of-the-party warmth and expansiveness.  By the way, it’s worth noting from the closing photographs of the actual Eunice and Rubens Paiva that the actors playing them are perhaps less conventionally good-looking than the real people were – not something you’d be likely to get in a Hollywood biopic.

    The events of 1996 aren’t quite the end of I’m Still Here.  The film’s last and shortest section is set in São Paulo in 2014, four years before Eunice Paiva’s death at the age of eighty-nine.  Like the opening Leblon beach sequence, the closing scenes centre on a family gathering.  By now, Marcelo isn’t the only wheelchair user; Eunice is too, and we gather from her children’s conversation that she’s suffering from Alzheimer’s.  At first, I thought Fernanda Torres’ appearance here was the result of ageing make-up even more ingenious than in the 1996 section; it was only when I saw the cast list that I realised the octogenarian Eunice wasn’t Torres at all but her mother, Fernanda Montenegro.  Salles’ international breakthrough came with Central Station (1998), starring Montenegro, who’s widely considered to be Brazil’s greatest-ever theatre and cinema actress.  Now ninety-five, she’s on screen for only a few minutes in I’m Still Here but it’s long enough for her to prove – without speaking a word – that she’s still a remarkable performer.

    Among her children and grandchildren, Eunice seems mentally more absent than present; Salles then briefly shows her alone in an adjoining room.  A television is on, broadcasting a news report about the findings of the National Truth Commission, which investigated human rights violations during the military dictatorship.  Photographs come up on the TV screen of three particularly well-known victims of the regime, the last of whom is Rubens.  When she sees his photograph, Eunice gives a tiny gasp; without seeming to comprehend quite why, she fills up.  This moment of half-recognition might have been merely sentimental:  Fernanda Montenegro’s artistry renders it a stroke of genius.  (Warren Ellis’s pleasant score for the film also tends to sentimentality but Salles knows when and when not to use the music.)  Walter Salles’ most recent dramatic feature before this one was On the Road (2012).  I don’t know the reasons for his long absence from cinemas but I’m Still Here is good reason to celebrate his return.

    19 February 2025

    [1] According to Wikipedia:  ‘Paiva’s political career began in October 1962, when he was elected Congressman for the state of São Paulo by the Brazilian Labour Party. … After the Brazilian government was overthrown in 1964, Paiva, among other politicians, had his congressional tenure revoked by the military government … Shortly after the coup, Rubens Paiva voluntarily left Brazil for self-exile in Yugoslavia and … Paris … Nine months later, he was supposed to fly to Buenos Aires for a meeting with … deposed left-wing leaders … During the lay over in Rio de Janeiro, he left the plane and boarded on [sic] a flight to São Paulo, heading to his house, where his wife and children lived.  Paiva then moved with his family to Rio de Janeiro and returned to work as a civil engineer, while continuing to collaborate with and assist exiled left-wing militants and guerrilla members in Brazil and abroad’.

    [2] Marcelo Rubens Paiva became a tetraplegic at the age of twenty, after jumping into a shallow lake and fracturing his spine.  He eventually regained movement in his arms and hands.  Feliz Ano Velho, published in 1982, tells the story of his accident and partial recovery, and recalls events from earlier in his life.

  • The Substance

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Coralie Fargeat (2024)

    Striking imagery and succinct storytelling get The Substance off to a strong, funny start.  A close-up shows the contents of a syringe being injected into an egg yolk, which gives birth to a second yolk that sits alongside it.  A star is put in place on Hollywood Boulevard, bearing the name Elisabeth Sparkle:  a passage-of-time montage leaves the star showing signs of wear and tear; the montage culminates with a clumsy pedestrian dropping fast food on it.  Cut to a TV studio, where an aerobics session is taking place.  It’s fronted by aforementioned Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), flanked by other middle-aged women in leotards, all in quite good shape but none as good as Elisabeth.  She ends the workout looking into the camera, promising viewers she’ll be working on the lateral abs next week and telling her audience to ‘Take care of yourself!’  She leaves the studio and heads down a long corridor, its walls adorned with portraits bearing witness to Elisabeth’s celeb longevity.  Colleagues wish her happy birthday on her journey down the corridor towards the women’s restroom.  It’s out of use so she pops her head round the door of the gents’, sees that it’s empty and slips into one of the cubicles.

    Enter TV boss Harvey (Dennis Quaid), bawling into his mobile phone – about Elisabeth.  He derides her age – today’s her fiftieth birthday – and says she’ll be getting the boot.  Harvey exits the restroom and Elisabeth emerges from the cubicle in a changed frame of mind.  Driving away from the TV studios and distracted by the sight of her image being removed from a roadside billboard, she crashes her car.  In ER, a middle-aged hospital doctor (Tom Morton) assures her no bones are broken, that his wife’s a big fan of Elisabeth.   He discharges her but when the doctor leaves the room, his assistant says there’s one further test to do.  This young male nurse (Robin Greer) feels Elisabeth’s spine, murmuring that she’d be a ‘good candidate’.  He confirms she can go home but not before slipping something into Elisabeth’s coat pocket – a USB stick, inside a piece of folded paper on which are written the words ‘It changed my life’.

    For twenty minutes or so, Coralie Fargeat’s film is excellent – it’s a pity there are still two hours to go.  Those opening visuals anticipate what’s coming in different ways.  The egg yolks neatly summarise the main storyline:  desperate for rejuvenation, Elisabeth Sparkle gets hold of a black-market drug that generates a younger version of herself.  Perhaps the yolks’ colour foresees the golden-mustardy coat in whose pocket she finds the fateful message, and which she’ll wear off and on throughout the story.  But that ketchup-drenched food slopping on her Walk of Fame star, along with the red walls and carpeting of the corridor beyond the TV studio, predict writer-director Fargeat’s bloodthirstiness.  As the elixir’s dreadful consequences pile up, the film’s distinctive look – clinically sinister interiors, tilted camera angles – is subsumed in garish body horror.  Once she injects herself with the single-shot serum, Elisabeth is – to put it mildly – never the same again, and the same goes for The Substance.  From the point at which the protagonist’s convulsed body generates a new body via a deep red slit in her back, Fargeat is almost continuously upping the gruesome ante.

    There’s no shortage of rules attaching to the life-changing drug.  The original body is the matrix for its offspring; the new body requires a regular injection of ‘stabiliser fluid’ to guard against deterioration.  The two bodies must alternate conscious existence for seven days at a time, the active body feeding the unconscious one intravenously during the latter’s week off.  Any deviation from the schedule entails an irreversible physical consequence for the currently inactive body.  When Elisabeth’s younger version, Sue (Margaret Qualley), brings a man (Oliver Lesage) home at the very end of a week’s stint and wants to prolong the bedroom experience, she takes an extra hit of stabiliser and exceeds the time limit (The Substance has echoes of Cinderella as well as Faust).  The index finger on Elisabeth’s right hand immediately transforms into the finger of a wizened crone.  Until now, Sue has, in two ways, been working out just as Elisabeth wanted.  The network TV channel advertises for a new presenter, aged between eighteen and thirty, for the weekly fitness show.  Sue wows at the audition, gets the job and proves an instant hit as the star of what used to be ‘Sparkle Your Life’ and is now ‘Pump It Up’.  But Sue’s infringement of the rules is the turning point in Elisabeth’s relationship with her new self.   Her pre-injection briefing pack contained a card instructing Elisabeth to ‘REMEMBER YOU ARE ONE’; Sue has decided to forget that.

    The trouble is, so does Coralie Fargeat.  Horror movies don’t demand conventional realism but they do need to make sense within the world the film-maker has created.  Elisabeth lives in her vast Los Angeles apartment with only photographs and awards she once won for company; she has no friends or family; we accept her complete social isolation as an expression of the utter loneliness of the fading star.  What’s not acceptable is that Fargeat doesn’t address the nature of Elisabeth-Sue’s supposedly shared consciousness.  It’s hard not to be struck, even in the early stages of Sue’s existence, by her lack of personality – either distinct from or clearly reflecting Elisabeth’s:  Sue is simply an icon of flawless youth.  (You may find yourself wondering too why Elisabeth’s middle-aged fan base is happy with this junior replacement – and with ‘Pump It Up’’s correspondingly youthful support troupe – or how many of Sue’s contemporaries would be glued, even on their phones, to a daytime keep-fit show.)  Fargeat’s indifference to the partnership’s mentality is an elephant in the room once conflict develops between the older and younger woman – as Elisabeth becomes a bitter recluse and Sue determined to break the rules to enjoy her success, making Elisabeth more decrepit each time that she does.  Instead, Fargeat contrives to make the pair simultaneously conscious so that they can physically fight.  By now, Elisabeth is a cadaverous hunchback but she slugs it out with Sue.  There’s a lot of bashing of heads on a tiled bathroom floor.

    Fargeat must be well aware that plenty of people will be happy to take just what they want from The Substance.  There’s one chunk of the audience predisposed to receive it as a searing indictment of Hollywood’s and the wider media’s standards of beauty and demands for how women must look.  Another target group is eager for non-stop horror spectacle, and they’re very well catered for.  Some of the critical plaudits for the movie hail it as ‘gloriously gruesome’, and so on:  the relentless OTT quality seems to be mistaken for genuine wit.  Fargeat has been complimented even by hard-to-please Armond White.  In the latest edition of his notorious annual ‘better than’ list, White commends The Substance because ‘Coralie Fargeat gives the Me Too movement the outrageous treatment it deserves’.  Fargeat may be surprised to learn this is what she was doing and it’s true that White’s judgments are increasingly deranged.  (Trump’s return to power, which White celebrated back in November, seems to have left him madder than before, in both senses of the word.)  Even so, an Armond White endorsement is evidence of just how far you can get manipulating themes as politically suggestive as those of The Substance.

    As well as skewering the age-and-beauty culture of Hollywood etc, Fargeat seems to imply that this is rooted in mercenary misogyny and exploitation, thus opening the door to a more broadly ‘feminist’ interpretation of her film, though this isn’t entirely straightforward for her.  Fargeat’s camera displays and inspects the naked bodies of Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley enough to make you wonder again if the female gaze in cinema is really so unexceptionable (see note on Eva Husson’s Mothering Sunday (2021)).  But Fargeat keeps the feminist door open – or seems to think she does – through the way in which she presents the male characters in the story, who are mostly vile or pathetic or both.

    Their chief representative, of course, is rebarbative media bigshot Harvey (a loaded name) who, after getting rid of Elisabeth, gives her a cookery book to occupy her retirement and Sue the plum job of hosting the TV channel’s upcoming New Year’s Eve extravaganza.  Other men are also worth noting.  There’s awkward, milquetoast Fred (Edward Hamilton Clark), who bumps into Elisabeth just after she gets the push, reminds her they were in tenth grade together, tells her he still thinks she’s the most beautiful girl in the world.  There’s the dimwit neighbour (Gore Abrams) whose face lights up when Sue rather than Elisabeth answers his ring on her doorbell:  he tells Sue to let him know of any jobs she wants doing and that he’s got ‘a big hammer’.  There’s Sue’s hunk boyfriend (Hugo Diego Garcia), who flees the apartment in terror after catching sight of geriatric, deformed Elisabeth in the bathroom.  There’s a decaying old man (Christian Erickson) in a diner, revealed to be the original of the male nurse who slipped Elisabeth the USB stick.  There’s a pair of casting directors (Daniel Knight and Jonathon Carley), who audition and bitch about applicants for ‘Pump It Up’.  A more ominous man-in-charge takes the form of just a voice (belonging to Yann Bean), which answers Elisabeth’s and, in due course, Sue’s desperate calls to the Substance helpline and which is – from their point of view – dispassionately unhelpful.

    Armond White’s list rates The Substance ‘better than’ Wicked and Emilia Pérez, in which ‘hacks John M Chu and Jacques Audiard both exploit ethnic and trans feminism in two perfect parallels of stupid ineptitude’.  Yet Fargeat’s and Audiard’s films have a fair bit in common:  reckless momentum, automatic misandry, and a lead actress whose impact in the role she’s playing derives more from who she is – or, at least, from her public persona – than from characterisation.  Harvey, as he splashes noisily into the restroom urinal, rubbishes Elisabeth’s star reputation – ‘Oscar winner my ass! When was that? Like, in the 30s – for King Kong?!’  Demi Moore isn’t an Oscar winner; in fact, she’d never been nominated for an Academy Award – until The Substance.  She is, however, sixty-one and doesn’t look it:  the demands that Coralie Fargeat makes of her clearly demonstrate how good a body Moore still has.  (How much actress and director see the irony of this, given the film’s subject matter, is less clear.)  Nevertheless, Moore’s own star has fallen a long way since she was Hollywood’s highest-paid actress in the 1990s – so The Substance has comeback power, too, enough perhaps for Moore to win the Oscar.  She gives a good performance (it’s certainly better than Karla Sofia Gascón’s in Emilia Pérez) but it’s inevitably limited, since Elisabeth Sparkle is a woman almost always in extremis.  There are highlights – as when Elisabeth stands at the mirror, preparing for a date with poor old Fred that never happens:  Moore applies make-up then removes it, applies it again then wipes it off more aggressively, making herself look as bad as she can.  But this is a performance – like so much else in The Substance – in block capitals.

    Margaret Qualley, subject to even closer physical inspection by the camera, does as well as can be expected with her underwritten role.  It’s not until the New Year’s Eve TV show – the film’s climactic bloodbath – that Sue seems to have something close to independent life, and then only briefly.  The night before, she runs out of the stabiliser fluid that she’s squandered:  the helpline tells Sue she must revert to Elisabeth if she’s to get a new supply (but why?)  Elisabeth, now hideously aged, orders a serum with which to terminate Sue.  She can’t go through with it because she can’t kick the habit of wanting the star status that Sue now enjoys – this was just about the only time I felt that Fargeat conveyed some idea of Elisabeth’s partaking in Sue’s existence, rather than observing it enviously.  This triggers (but how?) the fight to the death between the two of them.   Sue wins but, deprived of Elisabeth, finds her own body deteriorating rapidly in the minutes before the TV show starts.  She injects herself with some of Elisabeth’s leftover activator serum, which creates a hideous mutated body, introduced by a title card as ‘MONSTRO ELISASUE’.

    At first glance, you think the Elephant Woman; then you realise some of the body parts are in unexpected places.  The nasty casting directors derided the girl immediately before Sue in the ‘Pump It Up’ auditions as, ‘Great dancer … Too bad her boobs aren’t in the middle of her face instead of that nose’.  That’s just where Monstro Elisasue’s boobs are – one of them anyway.  She wears as a mask a cutout of Elisabeth’s face but removes it as the show gets underway:  all hell breaks loose in the TV studio (without, it seems, the plug being pulled on the live broadcast).  The audience bays for blood – ‘Kill the monster, kill the monster!’  One man decapitates Monstro but to no avail:  she instantly grows another, more deformed head; when her arm breaks, it’s enough to soak her assailant and most of the rest of the audience in blood.  Monstro manages to escape but, in the street outside, explodes into a heap of viscera.  Elisabeth’s original face emerges from the gory rubble and finds its way to her Hollywood Boulevard star.   The face breaks into a ready-when-you-are-Mr-DeMille grin before melting into a bloody puddle.

    Coralie Fargeat won the screenplay award at Cannes last year for The Substance.  If she wins other such prizes, it will be reward for an ingenious idea rather than for a script that’s properly worked through.  Late on in the film, Fargeat seems to be catering to yet another constituency – the self-congratulatory spotters of references to other movies.  The film’s original music is by Raffertie but at one point Fargeat plays a bit of Bernard Herrmann’s score for Vertigo – perhaps the most famous cinema treatment of twinned women (and an unusually complicated instance of the male gaze).  The Herrmann melody sparked appreciative laughter in the Prince Charles Cinema where I saw The Substance – as did Fargeat’s quick burst of Also Sprach Zarathustra aka 2001: A Space Odyssey.  I’m afraid I didn’t get the relevance of this, except that the best male voice in Kubrick’s film belongs to HAL and the most interesting male voice in The Substance (the helpline voice) sounds like a computer, too.

    13 February 2025

Posts navigation