Review by Beatrice On 13-Oct-2024
Everyone has a body and at the same time depends on it: only when you feel that you inhabit every nook and cranny of it can you avoid reducing yourself to it, unless you wish to follow a mad path of detaching from your own body, or a perverse path where you are no longer distinguished from it.
Sparkle your Life
The star on the Walk of Fame is dirtied by fast food fallen on the ground, along with ketchup sauce, like blood.
It's Elisabeth's fiftieth birthday, and until now, her life has been sparkling.
Today, she receives a gift: news that she must be replaced due to age limits and, more importantly, loss of tone.
She's a sort of Jane Fonda of aerobics, but now the media needs fresh meat.
Every casting call is looking for women between 18 and 23, and there’s no place for her.
The disgusting Harvey, her producer, despite their contractual agreements, doesn’t intend to "give charity": "You know that a woman’s fertility begins to decline at 25?" "We need a young, hot one."
Monstrously portrayed through distorted wide-angle lenses, while he greedily devours a pile of shrimp, he crudely confirms that renewal is inevitable.
Due to an accident, Elisabeth learns about a product: The Substance, a substance that will irreversibly change her existence.
She chooses to give birth to another version of herself, just as an alter ego: she must remember that she is always and only ONE.
Have you ever dreamed of a better version of yourself? Younger, more beautiful, more perfect?
A split cell, injected, will allow this miracle, making the two bodies alternate one week at a time, with no exceptions.
It all happens in an aseptic bathroom, butcher-shop style, where the back tears open to release the other, called Sue, who will sew back the flesh of her own flesh...
Spasms, blood, gasps, noises, deafening music, hypnotic and disturbing images, infiltrations of Activator, Stabilizer, Switch, Food Matrix, Food Other Self make the two bodies a laboratory of alternate identities at the relentless rhythm of 7 days each—always and only one—while two eggs fry in the pan.
Sue begins to ride the wave of success, worshipped like a goddess moving among other handmaidens, with a provocative and seductive body language, accompanied by gynecological close-ups to the beat of PUMP IT UP... you have to give your best!
But something foretold, yet ignored, begins to take effect.
After an astonishing, sophisticated, and well-structured first part, the screenplay stumbles into a grotesque and chaotic second part that is annoying and trashy. However, the ending redeems itself, landing on unpredictability, sarcasm, and farce.
It portrays the nightmare, the abyss, the obsession with aesthetic perfection produced by a parasitic media system that turns the female body into the perfect laboratory guinea pig.
Amidst the horror of dissected, scrutinized, spied on, used, sold, and sacrificed bodies on the altar of ratings, the most significant sequence is Elisabeth's inability to live out a normal encounter because she is now contaminated by her hetero-produced image, self-confirmed by a market that does not distinguish the body from the sum of its organs.
The artificial manufacturing of female beauty, produced by the male basic gaze, passes through passive patriarchal complicity among women and leads to cultural misogyny—diagonal, vertical, and horizontal, it may be.
Nothing changes because nothing truly needs to change. From California to Italy.
From Hollywood to BungaBunga, the cross-cutting stereotype of young, toned beauty is the patriarchal hetero-basic legacy of the brainless male fertilizing the soil of planet woman.
From Elisabeth's Sparkle to Drive In, from Sue's Pump It Up to the Striscia la Notizia of showgirls, the gynecological close-ups travel the sadly contemporary Ciao Darwin, indecent, ultra-trash, perverse, and polymorphic pop degradation of the media while commercial TV sells mattresses with scantily-clad young handmaidens lounging on memory foam.
Everything changes so that nothing truly changes!
No glimmer of reflection in the artificial manufacture of bodies for media use and abuse: biological/aesthetic life comes first, and the journey often ends there with no possibility of redemption.
The only revenge, a recurring theme from the French director, lies in the blood splashed in the faces of the audience, made up of old, decrepit male shareholders, nascent queens, complicit upper-class bourgeois, and indifferent, self-referential capitalist systems.
Only the monstrosity produced by the system claims its own status, ultimately transforming into a smiling Medusa that invokes horror, the other face of beauty that both fascinates and repels, seduces and kills, leading us back to the beginning, to the first scene in a tragic and abyssal circularity.
Just as we cannot simply be our body because each individual is irreducible to the matter or function of their organs, similarly, we cannot simply have a body, unless it is assumed that the subject of such possession is a disembodied soul that animates its body like a helmsman with their ship. Each of us is both a physical body projected outward into the world and a psychic body that reflects the inner being.
But that is another story.
13-Oct-2024 by Beatrice