Michael Douglas on The Tonight Show on February 21, 1992: “I think second-generation actors—particularly if you’re the son of an actor or the daughter of an actress, it takes you a little longer to find yourself, I think… This is one of the few businesses or areas—unlike cleaners or carpenters—where if you act like your father or your mother you don’t have your own identity.” Johnny Carson added that Kirk Douglas had begun introducing himself as “Michael Douglas’ father.” The younger Douglas confirms the story, and says, “I know sometimes he’ll have a woman reporter—all due respect, Miss Taylor—come up to him and say, ‘Are you jealous of your son’s success?’ And he said, ‘Only a woman would ask me that. This is a sense of immortality, of the romantic continuity of generations—so he’s been wonderfully supportive.”
Taylor had no reply; despite Douglas’ indelicate delivery, what he said still rings true today. Coralie Fargeat’s latest feature, The Substance, debuted at Cannes earlier this year to an 11-minute standing ovation, and when I saw it at the Charles on Friday, the somewhat sparse crowd burst into applause at the end; the same thing happened all weekend. It’s 140 minutes, but speeds by at a steroidal pace, all extreme wide angles and aggressive sound design that never let up. All “plausibility” is thrown out the window, as it should be in any genre movie like this. Demi Moore plays an aging actress named Elisabeth Sparkle, and at 50, producers like Harvey (Dennis Quaid) are done with her. Time for a new girl.
Sparkle gets into a nasty car accident while looking at a billboard of herself being torn down, and after emerging without a scratch, she takes the tip of a creepy nurse to start taking “The Substance.” After an even creepier call to some shadowy organization never shown or explained, Sparkle heads to a hidden facility full of lockers full of goop for gullible people; she doesn’t have to pay for the kit she brings home, a set of 14 liquid food tubes and “activation” and “switch” mechanisms. Injecting oneself and pureeing all your food isn’t that unusual in Los Angeles, and neither are disappearing celebrities, so it’s no issue when Sparkle disappears and “Sue” (Margaret Qualley) shows up to lead a new, better exercise show in Sparkle’s place.
Sue doesn’t emerge from out of nowhere, nor does she come knocking, sent by the organization making The Substance; she emerges out of Sparkle’s back, splitting it open and leaving her alive but unconscious for seven days. Sue and Sparkle must switch bodies every seven days, otherwise “what has gone cannot be regained.” The cycle is stable for a month, maybe, but eventually Sue and Elisabeth Sparkle start taking extra days for themselves, at their own expense: as Sparkle starts to grow necrotic, Sue runs out of activation fluid. Their bodies collapse into a gloriously horrific (and practical) puppet monster called “MONSTRO ELISUE,” who doesn’t disappoint at Sue’s scheduled New Year’s Eve performance.
The Substance ends with an orgy of blood and monsters, both the hideous blob on stage and all of the vultures in the audience first ready to eat her up, then eager to “SHOOT HER!!!” Monstro Elisue crawls back to Elisabeth Sparkle’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, where it’s promptly destroyed by a street cleaner. This movie isn’t a satire; it’s an absurd comedy, one with a premise that Adam Sandler could’ve made 20 years ago. It has nothing to say about how or why older women resent younger women, or why mothers are so often jealous of their daughters, it simply starts there as a basic, foundational truth. Everything in The Substance is believable, if not plausible, because that tragic reality is all around us. There’s no handwringing or lecturing about how society does this to women; it simply takes this as a given, and goes off into outer space with it. That’s not deep, but it’s a lot more enjoyable than the grim march of duds like Longlegs.
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