Even when a movie is intentionally a fable/black-comedy satire/allegory, the human characters need to behave in some recognizably-human way. So the company “selling” an experience that basically gives you a younger roommate, one that will likely take your time and age your body at an accelerated rate, DOES seem like an extremely bad deal!
I would have to watch again, but my strong impression was that the promise was instead ‘you will live a week in a younger body, then live the next week in your own body, then live another week in the young body, and so on.’ And if this had been stated explicitly as having been derailed ONLY by the protagonist failing to follow the rules, it would have been a respectable story in a respectable genre.
But that’s not what we saw. We saw the diverging of consciousness happen before Sue started ‘cheating’.
That’s very annoying.
The filmmaker DID leave herself an “out”: the car accident at the start of the movie. That makes it possible to interpret this as a “dying dream” story….not that such are very well regarded, these days.[/spoiler] but it WOULD explain the plot hole.
I did enjoy the various tributes to other movies: the visuals that recalled The Shining; the resonance with Death Becomes Her; and even what seemed an odd tribute to Warren Beatty’s 1990 Dick Tracy (the grotesque makeup and the yellow coat, at a minimum).
I wouldn’t discourage anyone from watching this. But I do question that Cannes “best screenplay” decision.
Nope. Doing spoilers but do we need to at this point?
It releases another version of yourself which comes from you, the matrix, a different, better, more perfect version of you, sharing one week for one and one week for the other … but “you are one and can’t escape from yourself”…
“Sharing” one week for one and one for the other—what was that supposed to convey?
If you’re right, then Moore’s character DID sign on for a roommate who would steal time from her and eventually age her body at an accelerated rate. Why would anyone agree to that deal?
It means that it delivered exactly as advertised. If you take the story as saying a literal thing, and of course no real person would sign on for that deal.
OTOH at a simple parable level? Do you not know people who care most if not only about what they present to the outside world, whose entire sense of self worth is based that approval, with some self loathing of the self the world doesn’t see? Isn’t that the classic tragic image of the Marilyn Monroe story and hosts of others? The public facing self sacrificing the person that gave birth to it for adulation with the complete self paying the price ultimately? Almost as if there is a split personality between the public figure and the insecure person who created it? This just taking that metaphor to the absurdist degree.
If you’re correct that Elisabeth and Sue were never supposed to be sharing the same mind, then how does The Substance depict a character presenting themselves to the outside world? At no point was “Sue” claiming to be “Elisabeth.” No “self” was being presented. What was presented was a separate person (who happened to have some genetic features in common with the older person).
The entire premise makes no sense unless Elisabeth is experiencing what Sue experiences (at least in the beginning). If she is not, then it’s just a case of ‘older woman gives house-space to younger woman who has the same genes.’ How does your Marilyn Monroe comparison fit in with that?
The allegory of ‘older person makes bad choice for the sake of appearing young again’ doesn’t work with two separate people. If Elisabeth and Sue were always two separate people—and Elisabeth never got the benefit of living as a younger version of herself, but instead only lay unconscious as that younger version had her own separate-person adventures—then there’s no metaphor of a ‘split personality.’
[[[[[Apologies if we are still supposed to be masking references to the plot.]]]]]
Again, it is a absurdist parable, not a story that makes literal sense. To be very clear I did not like the movie, and it is also a mishmash of parable ideas that’s just messy and stretched out way too long to allow the viewer to feel the complicity of ogling the bodies involved.
But for that part of it, at no point was Marilyn Monroe claiming to be Norma Jeane Mortenson …
But this is not literally the Monroe story. Or about any single story. It is about the need for that adulation. Yes about desperation as adulation of body fades with aging. Yes about that sacrifice of your original self and denial of it being you, self contempt. Yes even about how it falls apart. I easily read the final bit as a story as the whole self collapsing from that split and self hate with self destruction and then trying to rebrand trying to show the world your tortured now very damaged whole hoping to still get love, desperate for the adulation, but of course rejected, as we the public have done to many …
I don’t think it works great, but not because the plot doesn’t make sense. Maybe thinking of the split as Jeckyl and Hyde would help? The Substance making “parts theory” (a psychological construct) not just an abstract conceptualization but a physical reality?
Has the filmmaker/writer (Fargeat) stated definitively that Elizabeth’s consciousness never lived in Sue’s body (as you assert)? Because even though people interpret movies as they wish, even in defiance of the auteur’s intentions, those intentions do matter.
Coralie Fargeat: Yeah, I think in both the script and the story in itself it was really the the idea to show the many different voices that we have that are talking to ourselves. One day it’s gonna fall on the couch and just eat in front of the TV, having no control at all. And the day after the other voice is gonna hate yourself for doing it and that’s exactly what happens with Elisabeth and Sue. Sue is the voice that you know hates the fact that Elisabeth didn’t manage to control herself and I think that those voices inside of us are so strong, they are so powerful, and they are really kind of bipolar. In a way that you can feel that it’s almost 2 different people that live inside you, and can totally change the way you feel with yourself.
You can feel good, and you can feel extremely bad. And showing that for real in another [physical] being, as the other voice, I thought was the most powerful way to kind of represent this battle. This kind of super violent conflict that we have within us, and whether it is towards the food, or towards judging herself for not being perfect. The fact that at the end Sue wants to kill Elisabeth because she hates what she represents and the external violence of it was really a way to kind of externalize for real all of this internal violence that we have within us regarding regarding those issues.
So yeah apparently the intent was to make literal the “it’s almost 2 different people that live inside you” …
I’d say that Fargeat here joins the club of directors who are deliberately ambiguous in talking about their films (Nolan about Inception; Aster about Hereditary, etc.)