DESIGN & CINEMA: The Substance (+ analysis of the film)
The Substance by Coralie Fargeat
USA-UK-France, 2024, 2h20, Original Version (VOSTF) - Not recommended for children under 12
With Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, Dennis Quaid
Elisabeth Sparkle, an actress with a distinguished past who became the host of a television aerobics show, is fired by her producer because of her age. She then experiments with a substance designed to create a younger version of herself. After a period of euphoria, the process descends into chaos. Marking the return to grace of an actress, Demi Moore, whose role is a reflection of her own career and, more broadly, of the obsolescence of female bodies in the Hollywood industry, The Substance is minimalist in its plot and maximalist in its visual and sound effects. Coralie Fargeat thus describes the progressive but radical degeneration of a Faustian pact of obvious morbidity, leading to an ultra-spectacular and deliberately grotesque debauchery, and a radical use of effects, like so many winks to cinephiles, from Stanley Kubrick to Brian De Palma, via Brian Yuzna and body horror. In the glitz of a Florida recreated on the Côte d'Azur, The Substance embraces its vulgarity and excess as both content and form.
Session followed by an analysis of the film by Nicolas Thévenin, publication director of the magazine Répliques and teacher à l'école de design Nantes Atlantique.
Enseignant / Permanents