“The Substance” figures in the long line of movies about what you might call “menopausal derangement syndrome” — the ostensibly crazy-making tragedy of a woman living past 50.
Warning: Spoilers ahead.
“I don’t know a single woman who doesn’t have a troubled relationship to her body,” writer-director Coralie Fargeat, said in press materials for her new film “The Substance.”
Ms. Fargeat describes herself as a feminist and her film as “a political statement to the world,” which explores the constraints of beauty culture and ageism that have “corseted women for so long.”
Part sci-fi parable, part beauty culture horror story, “The Substance” features a standard “pact with the devil,” or “be careful what you wish for” plot, familiar from classics such as “Faust,” “Frankenstein,” “Dracula” and “The Picture of Dorian Gray” — in which the hubristic defiance of God or mortality brings about catastrophe.
In this case, a woman risks everything in the pursuit of eternal youth and beauty. Sadly, it’s often hard to discern how the film is a critique — rather than a perfect example of — Hollywood’s typical commodification of female flesh.
On her 50th birthday, Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) a once-hot, now fading star of an 80s-style aerobics TV show is fired by her producer, the pointedly named “Harvey” (a super-smarmy Dennis Quaid, chewing the scenery). “It all stops at 50,” he explains to her.
“What stops?” she asks.
Harvey never responds, but there’s no need. We all understand his sexist syllogism: Fifty equals menopause; the “stopping” of fertility; the end of sexual and commercial “viability.” In other words, when the bleeding stops, so does your life.
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