The blood soaked cinema of Coralie Fargeat

Reality+ (2014, Short film 22 min)
Revenge (2017)
The Substance (2024)

Analyzing a director’s style just via 3 films can feel dicey especially if one of those 3 films is a short film as sometimes directors need a few films to find their voice. However, in the case of Coralie Fargeat her stylistic voice booms loud and clear from just this small sample set. Her newest film The Substance clearly builds on visual and thematic elements she had in her 2014 short film Reality+ and her previous feature Revenge. In fact, if one only sees the final few minutes of The Substance after seeing Revenge, it would be clear that this was a Coralie Fargeat feature. Her signature is there for all to see.

A better version of yourself but for a limited time

The core question at the center of The Substance is “Have you ever Dreamt of a better of yourself?”.

Fargeat first explored this idea in Reality+ where characters can overlay their physical appearance with a desired Avatar of their choosing after they undergo a procedure. There is a time-limit to their physical appearance (12 hours) after they which they return to their regular self and they cannot transform into their Avatar again until a certain waiting period has lapsed. The Substance also has a time limit for the new and improved version of oneself but it is for alternating 7 day intervals. Meaning, the self and other-self live their lives in alternating weeks.

Other than the time-limit, there is another difference between how Reality+ and The Substance approach the self vs other-self. In Reality+, the new-self is only a physical appearance superimposed on the original self so in essence both are the same shared mind, conscious. Whereas, the body separation in The Substance creates two physical entities that become two competing egos/personalities sharing the same core fluids. This difference leads to the tug of war in The Substance where the balance is disrupted.

There will be Blood, lots of it

Revenge is a blood soaked film where Jen’s character (Matilda Lutz) seeks vengeance for her rape and attempted killing. At the start of the film, Jen and Richard (Kevin Janssens) fly to a harsh desert landscape where Richard is planning a hunting trip with his buddies Stan (Vincent Colombe) and Dimitri (Guillaume Bouchède). Before his buddies arrive, Richard is using the time for a romantic getaway with Jen leaving his wife and family back at home. When Richard goes away for a few hours to arrange paperwork for the hunting trip, Stan rapes Jen. Richard tries to play this violent act down but Jen wants to leave for home immediately. Richard tries to reassure her but instead attempts to kill Jen and thinks he has succeeded. As the saying goes “what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger”. Jen survives, grows in strength and goes on a bloody violent hunt to eliminate the 3 men.

Despite the oodles of blood sprayed across the screen, Revenge has a music video visual aesthetic where yellow and red palettes pop with a techno track. At times, the interior shots of the film feels like a N.W Refn film taking place in bright daylight while the exterior desert shots echo Mad Max. However, it is clear that Fargeat has her own unique sensibilities as the camera hones in on tiny details and expands them with close-ups or extended sequences where scenes that would normally be depicted in seconds unfold over minutes. The film is more style than substance (pun not intended).

The Substance starts off as a sci-fi body horror film but it ends up united with Revenge in soaking the screen with blood. The slight difference is timing of the blood. In The Substance, blood spurts wildly on the screen only in the final third whereas blood starts flowing liberally in Revenge near the halfway point of the film. In terms of quantity, the sheer non-stop gushing of blood in The Substance more than overtakes the total blood oozed in Revenge.

Mirror Mirror on the Wall

The concept of beauty is prominent in all 3 films and all 3 films feature characters who embody aspects of beauty and are obsessed about with their appearance. Their obsession is emphasized by the usage of mirrors, which are featured prominently in Reality+ and The Substance where the main characters spend plenty of screen time admiring / detesting their physical appearances. In Revenge, the main character Jen doesn’t need to stand in front of a mirror as she is constantly stared at by the three men. The house/villa in the film has plenty of glass windows which give the men plenty of ways to ogle her.

Small World in a Large landscape

Reality+ is set in Paris, The Substance in Los Angeles while Revenge is shot in Morocco but the desert landscape isn’t ever named in the film and could be multiple locations around the world (Mexico is indirectly implied by the beer). Despite the vast landscape of all 3 films, Fargeat's characters go back-forth in between a few locations only. This creates a mini-world for the characters where their entire universe consists of a closed loop allowing them to visit a few familiar spots and coming across only a few people. As a result, the films are stripped of any plot fat and don’t have any unnecessary characters, dialogues or scenarios. However, the thin plot doesn’t translate into a lean running time for the two feature films.

Instead, Revenge (1 hour 48 min) and The Substance (2 hour 21 min) fill their time with eye-popping visual details amped up by loud music and often repeat the same details over and over despite the point being hammered home much earlier. Reality+ is the best of the three films and gets its point across in 22 minutes. The Substance has a wicked trailer but loses steam after repeated sequences before its jaw-dropping squirming final third.

Style over Substance

Reality+ has more substance than style but the opposite is true of the two feature films Revenge and The Substance where the visual style, aesthetic look, mood take precedent over any plot or general themes. There are clear ideas that Coralie Fargeat wants to convey and she is comfortable blending multiple genres to achieve that. Both feature films played at TIFF’s Midnight Madness section (Revenge had its World Premiere in this category at TIFF) which is where one would expect these films although in the case of The Substance, the film managed to get a Cannes Competition slot. That Cannes slot feels in keeping with the film’s core element where the other-self tries to create a life of her own away from original self, so the film tried to carve a life of its own away from a Midnight slot by escaping into the main Competition slot.

Triple Bill of Alexander Mackendrick

The Man in the White Suit (1951)
The Ladykillers (1955)
Sweet Smell of Success (1957)

I was already a fan of Alexander Mackendrick as evident by the ranking of his two Ealing studio films The Man in the White Suit and The Ladykillers at #22 and #35 respectively in my Top 60 Comedy films list. I associated Mackendrick with Ealing Studios and the Comedy Genre especially since four of the five films he directed for Ealing Studios were comedies with Mandy (1952) being the exception. All five of his Ealing Studio films: Whiskey Galore! (1949), The Man in the White Suit (1951), Mandy (1952), The Maggie (1954), The Ladykillers (1955). 

However, a recent viewing of Sweet Smell of Success led me to rethink Mackendrick’s films in a new light. The 1957 American film starring Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, Susan Harrison is dark look at human nature and on the surface is far removed from the comedic framework of Ealing studio films. Even though, The Man in the White Suit and The Ladykillers have a predominant comedic note, they aren’t pure comedies but contain dark notes. The Ladykillers is a dark comedy laced with crime while The Man in the White Suit is draped with shades of tragedy and irony along its sleeves. Sweet Smell of Success heightens the dark and tragic undertones from these two films and mutes any comedic element to a whisper. 

In Sweet Smell of Success, Tony Curtis’ Sidney Falco character is constantly joking, laughing but his character has an air of desperation about him while the entire film has tragedy written all over it. Sidney is a press agent who gets promotion money from owners to promote their club. All he needs is a good review or a mention of the club in a newspaper article from J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster). Sidney would go to any lengths to get on J.J’s good side including trying to fulfill J.J’s request to breakup his sister’s (Susan Hunsecker played by Susan Harrison) romance with a jazz musician. As Sidney tries to do whatever it takes to break up the romance, he starts to cross moral and ethical boundaries from which there is no turning back.

Sweet Smell of Success is a brilliant portrayal of American society at a time when newspaper reviews meant the world for financial survival for restaurants, theatrical plays and even movies. While traditional newspapers have been in decline in recent decades, some of the core elements of the film such as a smearing someone’s reputation, publishing false stories or personal affairs have sadly been amplified in our contemporary social media dominated world. In that sense, Mackendrick’s film and script co-written with Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman is still as relevant today as it was back in 1957.

Sweet Smell of Success belongs to a different genre but it is unified via 2 threads to Mackendrick's two Ealing Studio films. All three films are a keen insightful observation of characters while also provide an overarching commentary on society. The Man in the White Suit highlights the invisible hand or supply-demand forces that make things work. All the clothing textile company owners want the invention of an indestructible and dirt repellent fabric to fail as that would make people buy their clothes less. In The Ladykillers, the bank robbers try to justify their crimes as saying that no one would be hurt by the missing money because it would be a blip for the banks since insurance would cover it all while the robbers can use the money for their families benefit. There is a financial truth to what the robbers say as has become evident with all the banking and insurance frauds that have become much more commonplace since the film was released. Sweet Smell of Success shows a world where favours can open doors for people and the scenarios in the film are aptly described by the phrase “you scratch my back, I scratch yours”. This phrase still makes the world go around and allows careers to flourish and is at the core of our broken political machine.

I was a fan of Alexander Mackendrick before but after seeing Sweet Smell of Success, I am an even bigger fan. He clearly was one of the best directors to have worked in cinema, yet not as widely appreciated as his peers.

A double bill of Jorge Sanjinés

El coraje del pueblo / The Night of San Juan (1971)
Jatun Auka (1974)

I hadn’t come across any of Jorge Sanjinés’ films when exploring Bolivian cinema a decade ago. Now in 2024 when doing a similar search, his name showed up quite a bit. This change in internet searches feels driven by changing political landscape in Bolivia more than just chance or timing. Given the topic of Sanjinés films, it makes sense why it is likely easier to discuss his films openly in the last few years than it was in the early 2000s. As per this article by Carla Suárez, Jorge Sanjinés

“particularly focused on documenting indigenous cultures of the Andes: Aymara and Quechua. Sanjinés, an avid critic of colonialism, initiated his cinematic journey under the guiding principle “el cine junto al pueblo” (“cinema with the people”). He took a revolutionary Marxist approach to documentary filmmaking with the mission of giving a voice to the oppressed people of the Andean nation. In 1966, Sanjinés founded the Ukamau Group alongside screenwriter Oscar Soria, cinematographer Antonio Eguino, producer Beatriz Palacios and filmmaker Alfonso Gumucio. The group was named after the title of their first feature-length film Ukamau (meaning “and so it is” in Aymara).” Carla Suárez, 2021

I would like to speculate that the election of Evo Morales in Bolivia likely ushered a new interest in the cinema of Jorge Sanjinés and the Ukamau Group he co-founded. This is because in 2006 Bolivia finally had a president who came from the country’s indigenous population. Given the topics that Sanjinés explored in his films, it likely was easier to discuss them once the country had someone like Morales at the forefront.

In addition, Sanjinés' films especially such as Jatun Auka showcases the struggle of ordinary people against the wealthy land owners who used the strength of the military to suppress the people. This film also shows the role Americans played in training the Bolivian generals. Such cinema is labeled leftist or Marxist cinema and is rarely talked about in North American film critics sections. Somehow talking about guerrillas, resistance isn’t favoured by mainstream critical publications due to how they are funded. This also could be another reason why the cinema of Sanjinés was missing in the English language discourse I tried to search in the early 2000s.

Ukamau Group and Direct Cinema

Carla Suárez likens the cinema movement of Jorge Sanjinés to that of Neorealist cinema and cinéma direct:

"New Latin American Cinema is a film movement, inspired by Italian Neorealismo and Québec documentary genre cinéma direct, that used cinema as an instrument of social awareness and change." Carla Suárez, 2021

One of the aspects of Direct Cinema is the embedded nature of filmmaking where the filmmaker immerses themselves in the environment:

“For the cinéma direct filmmakers, the point of departure is the filmmaking process in which the filmmaker is deeply implicated as a consciousness, individual or collective. It is this process--this consciousness--which gives form and meaning to an amorphous objective reality. Instead of effacing their presence, the filmmakers affirm it.” David Clandfield’s essay From the Picturesque to the Familiar: Films of the French Unit at the NFB (1958-1964).

In this regard, Jorge Sanjinés’ two films seen as part of this spotlight meet the criteria as he clearly immerses himself in the local/village surroundings to depict events. The slight variation for The Night of San Juan is that the film is a documentary-fictional hybrid where villagers/workers re-enact events of the massacre that happened. Such a reenactment lends a reality to proceedings.

Jatun Auka shows how exploitation of people can lead to revolution which in turn leads to a cyclical nature of violence. The finale in the film shows Bolivian military aided by US troops killing revolutionaries and their bearded leader is also a reminder that it was in Bolivia that Che Guevara was killed.

Latin America has had many examples of filmmakers showcasing the human impact of revolution in their films. Patricio Guzmán is one of the best examples with his The Battle of Chile while from an overarching political exploration, Octavio Getino and Fernando E. Solanas’ The Hour of the Furnances (1968) comes to mind. The cinema of Glauber Rocha also explored such topics. Looking beyond Latin America, Indian director Shyam Benegal’s cinema also has a lineage to Direct Cinema in its depiction of plight of villagers.

References / Reading material:

Carla Suárez, Emergence of Indigenous Cinema in Bolivia: The Ethnographic Gaze of Jorge Sanjinés and the Ukamau Group.

Alonso Aguilar: Foundations of Resistance in Bolivian Cinema.

Direct Cinema covered earlier in this blog.

Shyam Benegal covered in this blog.

Glauber Rocha.