Coralie Fargeat's THE SUBSTANCE is a body horror shocker.
Half of the Cannes Main Competition has screened, and it seems we're in a year of big swings and even bigger faceplants. Divisive titles aplenty, the most acclaimed films of the festival appear to be located in parallel sections rather than Thierry Frémaux's selection. Even so, Jia Zhangke's Caught by the Tides has confirmed itself as the critics' favorite, though that only extends to writers already fond of the director's oeuvre. The documentary-fiction hybrid made no new converts. Jacques Audiard dazzled audiences with the trans-themed Mexican musical Emilia Perez, and while some critics are ecstatic, others loathe the thing. Reactions are more pointedly adverse to Kirill Serebrennikov's Limonov biopic, while Coralie Fargeat's The Substance has elicited equal pans and praise. Some folks online are trying to characterize the body horror's critical divide as a battle of the sexes, but that ignores the work of various women who've applauded the picture. Still, it's a controversial one.
Since all these cineastes have filled their filmographies with shocking violence, that felt like a good unifying theme for this Cannes at Home program. So, let's delve into Jia's Ash is Purest White, Audiard's Dheepan, Serebrennikov's Petrov's Flu, and Fargeat's bloody Revenge…
ASH IS PUREST WHITE (2018) Jia Zhangke
Ever since he shocked himself out of slow cinema observation with A Touch of Sin, every new Jia Zhangke film feels like it contains all those that came before. That 2013 cold shocker was already a nesting doll of reminiscences as much as it stared into a splatter future, but nothing compares to the melodramas to which Jia would dedicate the rest of the 2010s. First came Mountains May Depart, a dysfunctional tryptic that nearly falls apart in its last act before a dancing prologue brings it back together. And then there was Ash Is Purest White, the auteur's most apparent exercise in self-reference, perchance some critical nostalgia.
Like most of his works since Platform in 2000, the decade-spanning story centers on a figure played by the director's muse, co-author, and wife, Zhao Tao. As if reliving her Unknown Pleasures gangster moll, the actress goes as far as recycling her costumes and wigs but approaches the part with more maturity. A sense of fatalism enshrines Zhao Qiao, for that is her screen name, including when to protect her beau, the woman takes his gun and fires it to the heavens. It's a dangerous move that lands her in jail, waiting for the day of her release when the boyfriend should still be waiting for her release. Only he isn't.
Jia next pulls from Still Life and its visions of lovers separated by time and absence, their fates enmeshed with China's own dramas of progress and industrialization. Amid the bleakness, the spiky milieu from Touch re-emerges. At the same time, the multi-act centrality of Zhao Tao is Mountains May Depart all over again, made sharper this time and more genre-savvy. By capturing a double act of national and personal histories, Jia creates a knotted object with a spectacular performance as the linchpin of its whole construction. It's a fascinating tour de force that should have earned Zhao Tao the big festival Best Actress prize she's earned in the past two decades of creative partnership.
Ash Is Purest White is streaming on Kanopy and Tubi. You can also rent and purchase it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, and YouTube.
DHEEPAN (2015) Jacques Audiard
After the success of A Prophet in the 2009 Official Competition, many felt Jacques Audiard was overdue for a Palme d'Or. When that didn't manifest for 2012's Rust & Bone, the groundswell of support only intensified, reaching its fever pitch when Frémaux announced the titles for the 2015 edition. Sadly, once Dheepan was considered within the broad scope of its competitors, comparisons diminished the French film. And then it all turned to shit when the Coen Brothers led Jury awarded Audiard with the Palme d'Or, snubbing such works as Haynes' Carol, Hou's The Assassin, Lanthimos' The Lobster, and Nemes' Son of Saul.
Suddenly, Dheepan became shorthand for an undeserved Palme winner, receiving nothing but skepticism from critics worldwide. Even today, the picture's soiled reputation precedes it, and that's unfair, to say the least. While not ranking among Audiard's top titles, the immigration tale still feels like a culmination of many of his pet themes and favorite visual strategies. A work of social realism, full of grit and bloodshed as is the director's preference, Dheepan offers an uncommonly lucid look at the promise of a new life in faraway lands, the European dream and its poisonous reality, the political pressures weighing down those in search of redemption.
Most of all, it's an astonishing piece of character portraiture, held together by one of the best casts Audiard ever directed. Sure, there are no big names of French cinema among its ranks, but that need not be a mark against the film. Kalieaswari Srinivasa, in particular, delivers one of the best performances to bow at the Croisette during the 2010s and would have made a just Best Actress victor if Dheepan was to be without its Palme. Her work with Audiard behind the camera and Jesuthasan Antonythasan in front of it does a great deal to justify the film's abrupt finish. Which, in a milieu of misery, feels like a radical reach for hopefulness.
Dheepan is streaming on AMC+, Kanopy, the Criterion Channel, and IFC Films Unlimited. You can also rent or purchase it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, and YouTube.
PETROV'S FLU (2021) Kirill Serebrennikov
In post-Soviet Yekaterinburg, a mechanic has the flu. As you may have guessed by the title, he is named Petrov and Serebrennikov's film is his feverish nightmare across a world set out of sorts, out of whack, upside down and always teetering on the verge of cosmic collapse. At least, so it seems from his feverish POV, body temperature so high it feels like the brain is steaming. In such a state, it's no surprise when hallucinatory imagery starts popping up. If you've ever been in bed, fighting a high fever while shadows of materialized paranoia loomed over you, here's that experience articulated for the big screen – have fun.
But to presume this Alexey Salnikov's adaptation is nothing but a dream play under the weather would be erroneous. Moreover, Serebrennikov never posits what parades across the screen as an unreality within the narrative. Instead of banality filtered through a sick mind, transformed into nightmare, the world itself is sick and there's nothing you can do about it. Indeed, the camera often abandons Petrov to his meandering odyssey, visiting other members of an erstwhile family rocked by unhappiness and separation. For example, a librarian ex-wife keeps fighting what's best described as some kind of demonic possession, complete with unearthly violence.
It's so much, maybe too much, though it all makes sense within Serebrennikov's fluid realization of a night terror stretched to feature length. Fluid in construction but not in texture, for there's no liquid caress in Petrov's Flu, a muscular exercise blessed with strong materiality, often born from physical transitions that would feel more at home in an old Russian theater than in the movie studio. And through it all, a sense of contagion prevails, as if madness passed from person to person, by film editing and stagecraft, if not by contact. Yet, one also senses space for memory in this horror of the now and the capacity for pleasure sprouting from the uproar. In summation, it's one of those films that must be seen to be believed – there's nothing else like it.
Petrov's Flu is available to rent and purchase on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, and YouTube.
REVENGE (2017) Coralie Fargeat
A desert landscape stretches across the screen, sharp rock and barren earth that will somehow transition into green oasis by the end of the track. Through movie wizardry, the image morphs into the reflection on a pair of douche-y mirror sunglasses. They're worn by Richard, a wealthy married man taking his mistress to a sex holiday on an isolated property. Young and beautiful, Jen is there to have fun while dreaming of what opportunities she could enjoy with a move to Los Angeles. Unexpectedly, a pair of Richard's friends show up for a hunting vacation, and one of them rapes Jen. Feeling trapped, she runs, ending at a cliff's edge with the three men. Then down she goes, into the abyss. They presume her dead. She isn't, but they soon will be.
From that first shot through the shades, Coralie Fargeat proposes a twist on the rape-revenge thriller that problematizes the camera's gaze and beckons a feminist reading on the subgenre's tropes, its vices, and inherent contradictions. Not that the director denies the sexualization of her female lead. You can explore the subversive possibilities of horror cinema, even its issues, without denouncing the genre's perverse pleasures. Indeed, she plays with them, framing Jen's red underwear like a lewd porno prologue, but also literalizing a pop pink barrier standing between her and the men who consider her nothing but a body. The film is equally obsessed with masculine nakedness, the sculptured lines of the male physique, the bounciness of a flaccid cock.
Colorful, impossibly saturated, the world looks like a soft drink commercial crossed with a tits-and-ass-heavy video game. That said, the advertisement idioms both inspire easy pleasure and incite disquiet. The style flattens everyone, and rather than rendering that flattening invisible, Fargeat makes us notice the pressure to squeeze one into bi-dimensionality. It's fun with a big "but" blinking in neon lights. But, in all this, does Fargeat consider these people as characters rather than bodies? Maybe she doesn't. Yet, that need not be a point against Revenge. One would presume the path to subversion and redemption would come through a humanized victim or a gaze that refuses to find thrills in the carnage. And to that, Fargeat holds up her middle finger.
Sometimes, no characterization is the way to go, though narrative cinema has conditioned us to expect psychology and conventional methods of drama. We don't even need a plot, despite what many say. Nor do we need a story. Sorry, not sorry. In Revenge's case, the film holds the notion that you shouldn't need to know these people to know that what the men did to Jen is wrong or to understand her fight for survival, her rage, her need for retribution. In tabloid parlance, she may be a bad victim, and that's precisely why centering her is so inspired. Women are not responsible for the sexual violence perpetrated against them, no matter what they do, how they dress, or behave.
Don't go looking for idealized victimhood here, and heed Fargeat's furious demand that you reflect upon that impulse. People shouldn't need to be noble and perfect for us to care. A bold, fearless image maker, out to seduce and perturb, the director wants her audience as sickened as they are entertained. She's also pretty didactic, one must admit, but there's an avoidance of outward moralism that makes the flick feel fresh. I also have issues with the animal symbolism peppered throughout, though that's more of a pet peeve than an outright issue with the filmmaking. Weirdly funny and undeniably carnal, harrowing as fuck, Revenge is one hell of a feature debut, obsessed with both the fragility of bodies and their supercharged horror movie resilience. In other words, it'll make you squirm. Isn't that lovely?
Revenge is streaming exclusively on Shudder.
What do you make of all these divisive receptions at the Croisette? And which of these directors' past works most excites you?