the substance (w&d coralie fargeat)

It seemed strangely appropriate that we watched Fargeat’s Grand Guignol film on the same day I saw that Dennis Quaid, the film’s evil driving force representing the male gaze at its most lascivious and destructive, had come out in support of Trump, one of the very few Hollywood stars to do so. One suspects that Fargeat would be secretly pleased with this news, she might even have engineered it. The battle lines even more clearly drawn within the great metaphysical struggle over the beauty myth.

At the same time, it feels as though there’s something dangerously Trumpian in the film’s excesses. Trumpian in so far as the gesture and the controversy become more relevant than anything that is actually being said. Fargeat pushes the visual excesses of the story as far as she can go. This is set up from the start, with an edit style that seems derived from advertising, all fast cuts and pumped up musical beats. The characters are deliberately two dimensional. Subtlety is not going to be part of this discourse. It’s in-your-face, a punk assault on the senses. The object is firstly to titilate and then to revolt, two sides of the sensory coin.

The result is somewhere between shock and awe and tedium, two sides of the war coin, perhaps. The issue one might have with the film is that the war is woman versus woman, with woman losing twice over. It might be that everyone else also loses, in the end, but Demi Moore’s Elizabeth and Margaret Qualley’s Sue seem to get the rough end of the stick. Which again, might be the point: that no matter what, the fetishisation of women’s bodies by this society always means that women get the rough end of the stick.

I spent much of the film wondering what Mariana Enriquez would make of it. One suspects she would delight in its transgressive intentions, whilst perhaps hoping for something else to emerge from the melange. There’s no shortage of wearing of influences on sleeves. From Picture of Dorian Grey, (inverted), to Jekyll and Hyde, to Frankenstein. With direct references to The Fly and The Elephant Man. The combination of all these elements perhaps contributes to a sense that for all its outrageousness, this feels like a conservative piece of filmmaking, with few narrative surprises.

I also then found myself wondering what Trump would make of it. Suspecting he would publicly denounce it, whilst privately loving it, for all the wrong reasons.