I’m just in from The Substance and my head is still spinning from the heavy dose. More on that below.
My understanding of Indian art house movies pretty much starts and ends with Chaitanya Tamhane’s Court and The Disciple, so it’s a pleasure to encounter this one, All We Imagine As Light. It’s told through the perspective of three women, nurses in Mumbai. One was abandoned by her husband after an arranged marriage, the other is dating a Muslim, and the third, the eldest, her husband passed away leaving no documents to suggest she’s entitled to the apartment they lived in, which is under threat of being demolished. Much of the fist half of the film is shot at night, scenes accompanied by a wonderful, jazzy piano score giving the whole production an old school romanticism despite the gritty kitchen-sink of it all.
The second half of the film takes the nurses to a rural village, and the film brings in a more dreamlike quality. It’s slow going at times, but the portrait of these women’s lives bumping up against the urban realities of domestic economics, sexism, and even pet ownership keeps things interesting.
When The Light Breaks is from Icelandic director Rúnar Rúnarsson is a story of sudden, unbearable grief amongst a group of students. Diddi and Una go to an art college and are in a band together. They’re in love and planning for their futures, but first Diddi has to break up with his long-distance girlfriend, Klara. On the way to do so he’s in an accident and is killed — leaving Una devastated and seeking comfort in their mutual friends. That’s when Klara comes into town to join them, and Una has to bite her tongue about what was going on between her and Diddi. The entire film takes place over a single day and a scant 84 minutes, but still manages to punch way above its weight in the emotional stakes. Much credit needs to go to Elín Hall as Una, and the camerawork that keeps her emotive face in the centre of the screen for much of the running time. The way the director frames Una and Klara’s faces in the final 10 minutes — one shot overlays their eyes in the reflection of a window — says more than any dialogue could, combined with a haunting score.
Maybe the biggest surprise of the day was from writer-director Melanie Oates’ Sweet Angel Baby, from Newfoundland. It features a stellar performance from Michaela Kurimsky as Eliza, a woman who lives in a small community around the bay. She works at the local diner and is helping raise money for the church, which is about to be sold. What her friends and neighbours don’t know is that she also has an online persona where she posts arty, frequently nude photographs.
What might be considered a creative side hustle in the city is scandal fuel in her village, and beneath that gossip is her relationship with the woman who runs the diner, played by the also excellent Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers. Oates’ film deftly upends the typical fishing village narratives by injecting modern day sexual politics and tech morality. I might’ve enjoyed a score — it’s an entirely quiet, docudrama styled picture, but full marks for the directorial confidence and grace. It’s also probably the hottest film to come out of Atlantic Canada since The Bay Boy.
Now, for The Substance. The hype around this picture has been growing since it won the script award at Cannes, from writer-director Coralie Fargeat, but for the first act I was a lot more impressed by the cinematography and production design. The Substance is a deeply glossy, machine-gun edited body horror mining the fear of aging flesh, especially with women. Demi Moore is Elizabeth Sparkle, a former actor turned aerobics guru on TV who’s been fired by her boss, a loathsome, cartoonish Dennis Quaid, because she’s over 50 and that’s when it ends for her. Desperate to recapture a little of her youth, she submits to The Substance, a procedure that produces an instant clone in the form of Margaret Qualley’s Sue.
Younger, tauter, with a rounder ass (that the camera examines repeatedly) and a lot more glamorous, Sue gets her own morning fitness show, which she uses to springboard into bigger things. But Sue and Elizabeth are codependent — the same person in different bodies — and need to trade off lives in their strange, David Lynchian apartment. Of course, as Sue gets more successful she wants more time, disrespecting the balance with catastrophic results for both of them. As an allegory about women and aging in American culture, at first The Substance may seem too broad, and too obvious, to do any real damage to its targets — but once it rolls into its third act, we begin to see the lengths Fargeat will go to in order make her point.
The Substance has the grossest practical effects I’ve seen since The Reanimator, or maybe The Thing, splashing around in swimming pools of blood. Fantastic and disgusting.
