Our world does not often offer a safe space for female rage. But French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat has carved out a place to explore that emotion in her work. She shapes that anger into a spear to skewer society’s sexism, revealing the restrictive nature of toxic patriarchy, and allows her female protagonists to violently break free from those expectations.
Her 2017 debut, the stylish action thriller “Revenge,” took on rape culture, and in her sophomore feature, “The Substance,” she trains her lens on beauty standards in Hollywood. What Fargeat sees isn’t anything pretty. As a filmmaker, Fargeat has a particular interest in women’s bodies, how they seduce and beguile, how women’s bodies are objectified, commodified and sold, what they can withstand, how they can transform, and how, ultimately, women’s bodies are devalued and discarded.
She explores how women’s bodies are looked at by men, and therefore, how we are taught to look at women in media. Working with cinematographer Benjamin Kracun, and editors Jerome Eltabet and Valentin Féron in “The Substance,” Fargeat creates an outlandish parody of the “male gaze” until she gleefully punishes the viewer for looking at all. But the gaze is both outward and inward, seeking to understand how women are looked at, and how they look at themselves, judgments shaped by industrial and misogynistic external forces.
Demi Moore stars as actress Elisabeth Sparkle, a once-lauded ingenue who now hosts a popular TV.