|
Coralie Fargeat (France, 1976) debuted with shorts such as
the dystopian sci-fi movie Reality+ (2014).
Revenge (2017) is an amoral thriller with only four characters,
all of them amoral. It is a film about superhuman beings because they all
still stand and even run after being horribly wounded, mutilated and having
lost a lot of blood. The plot is generally implausible but the visual story
is much more compelling than the narrative one. For what it's worth,
the "revenge" is not so much a revenge as a fight for survival.
A helicopter lands in the desert, dropping a man and his sexy young girlfriend.
They walk into a house with a swimming pool, the only visible structure.
They make love right away and then the man, Richard, calls his wife.
While the girl is walking around scantily dressed, two men armed like soldiers
arrive. They are partners of Richard in an undefined shady business. The trio
has organized a fake hunting trip for whatever purpose. The girl, Jennifer,
is there only for a couple of nights to be used by Richard, and it is not said
whether she's an extramarital affair or a prostitute. In the evening they
party and take drugs. One of the two new arrivals, Stan, is clearly seduced
by the young woman. She tells him that her next stop is Los Angeles, where
she plans to become a celebrity. Richard shows them a very powerful drug
and Jennifer steals some.
In the morning Richard leaves Jennifer who has to pack because the helicopter
is coming to pick her up, but Stan flirts with her and eventually rapes her.
The other man, Dimitry, sees it but walks out indifferent, and, when Jennifer's
screams are too loud, he simply turns on the TV set. When Richard returns and
finds a traumatized Jennifer, he tries to calm her down offering her money
and a job in Canada. She demands to leave immediately and, when Richard
finds excuses, she runs away, chased by the three men all the way to a cliff.
Richard begs her to stop and promises to call the helicopter for her.
Then suddenly he pushes her down the cliff. She falls vertically until her
body is pierced by a sharp tree, which stops her fall. A branch cuts through
her belly and sticks out. She looks dead and Richard tells the other two that
they should still enjoy their hunting weekend. Jennifer wakes up. She is not
dead. She manages to grab her lighter and set fire to the tree, which releases
her body. She then drags herself under a rock. When the men return and look
down from the cliff, they cannot see her. By the time they descend the cliff,
she has run away. They follow the trail of blood on the beach but at some
point the blood stops because she has started walking in the water. The three
men split: Richard proceeds in one direction on a motorcycle, Dimitry in
the opposite direction on an ATV, and Stan remains in the car.
Dimitry stops to pee and Jennifer steals his gun, but the gun is not loaded
and he grabs her. He calls the others that he find her, and then punishes her
by pushing her head repeatedly underwater. She grabs his knife and sticks it
into one of his eyes, killing him. She then takes his knife and his gun with
ammunitions. She finds a cave and makes a fire. She has lost a lot of blood,
she is barefoot and wears only a bikini,
and she still has the piece of wood in her belly. She takes the powerful
drug and cuts her belly with the knife to extract the wood, and then melts
a beer can to use it to stop the bleeding. In the morning Richard and Stan
realize that Dimitry is missing. Stan finds his body in the water and
has a panic attack. Richard smacks him breaking his nose. Meanwhile, Jennifer
wakes up after a series of nightmares and finds a bird tattooed on her belly
because it was carved on the can that she used to stop her bleeding.
She walks out (always barefoot and scantily dresses) and scans the desert with
binoculars. She sees Stan's car approaching. She follows the car up a hill.
When the car runs out of gasoline, Stan has to stop and grab a tank from the
trunk. She shoots him but only wounds him. She chases him (always barefoot).
He is bleeding and this time it's her who follows the trail of blood.
He outsmarts her and shoots her but, being unstable on his feet after she
dropped some glass on the road that made a bit cut in one of his feet,
he misses and only severes one of her ears. He runs back to the car and drives
after her at high speed trying to run her over but she calmly aims and this
time she kills him. Then she takes the car.
Meanwhile, Richard rode the motorcycle back to his villa and calls the
helicopter. While he showers, he hears a noise. He searchs the villa and
doesn't see anything wrong, but suddenly she appears in front of him,
a bikini girl armed with a big gun. She shoots him but fails to kill him.
Thus begins a bloody shootout inside the rooms of the villa.
She can barely hear what he is shouting because she lost one ear.
He loses
so much blood that eventually she slips on blood and loses her gun.
Luckily, he has run out of bullets. She manages to regain her gun and
to kill him. Then she calmly walks outside while the helicopter is
approaching.
The Substance (2024) is a horror movie and a philosophical meditation
on addiction to fame and on desire for rejuvination in a society that values
youth and beauty over anything else. It starts out as a sci-fi movie but it quickly turns into an increasingly horror experience, and the sarcastic overtones
slowly take over. The orgy of blood towards the end is a bit ridiculous and in the end the message is old-fashioned (excessive ambition leads to ruin)and the satire of Hollywood has been done better many times, and so the movie is saved
by the portrait of neurotic split of personality, of sororicidal selfishness and of irresistible limitless addiction.
The film opens with workers building the star for movie star Elizabeth on Hollywood's
"hall of fame". Then, as the years go by, we see that the star is ignored by passers-by. Elizabeth is not the hostess of an aerobics TV show. It's her 50th
birthday. She accidentally overhears her producer on the phone asking for a
younger model who can take her place. She's already stunned, and on the way home she gets further hurt when she sees workers taking down a billboard of her show.
She loses control of the car and has an accident. At the hospital a young make nurse mentions to
her a "substance" that can rejuvinate people and gives her a phone number.
Dismissed from the hospital, she meets an old school friend, Fred, whom she
has forgotten but who is ecstatic to meet her and leaves her his phone number.
She looks embarrassed. At home she gets desperate about her situation (she's clearly being fired) and decides to try the substance. She follows instructions to a locker and finds instructions on how to use it: after injecting herself with the
substance,she splits into two women, a comatose herself and a young beautiful girl, and every day the younger self must be fed
"stabilizer fluid" extracted from the comatose self,
and every week she has to switch back to her real self.
The younger self applies for Elizabeth's job, calling herself Sue, and the producer is ecstatic to have found such a perfect substitute.
Excited by the success of the rejuvination trick, Sue breaks a wall to build
a secret closet and hide Elizabeth's body. Every day Sue needs to transfer some
fluid from Elizabeth's old body to her young body.
The neighbor, Oliver, comes to complain about the noise but is immediately smitten by her looks.
Sue's aerobics show becomes an instant hit. The seventh night, when she has to switch back to Elizabeth, she delays it because she's having sex with a man.
The result is that she starts losing strength and, when she switches in a hurry, Elizabeth shows signs of unusual aging: a deformed finger.
In a panic she calls the phone number of the substance dealer but he tells her that nothing can be done: she must never be Sue for more than seven days.
She is still in a panic when in a restaurant a very old man mentions to her
that it's hard to keep the seven-day schedule: she recognizes him as the
young nurse at the hospital, who in reality is that very old man.
Having realized that there is more to life than fame, she decides to call Fred,
who sounds like a nice man, and have a date with him, hiding the finger in a glove; but at the last minute she can't do it and locks herself in her house.
She becomes Sue again, incapable of giving up on fame. Elizabeth is becoming
neurotic and jealous of Sue. Sue on the other hand gets angry at Elizabeth for
behaving like a miserable old spinster. Elizabeth/Sue is splitting into two minds, not just two bodies.
Sue becomes so famous that the producer offers her to host the New Year's Eve show, which will be watched by 50 million people.
Sue keeps extending her existence beyond the prescribed seven days.
The result is that, when she finally switches back to Elizabeth, Elizabeth
has become a very old woman, with grey hair and arthritis.
Elizabeth watches a recording of Sue on television while cooking and vents
her jealousy and anger at her. Sue even makes fun of Elizabeth during the
TV interview.
Elizabeth complains over the phone with the
substance dealer that Sue is cheating and causing her to get old, but the
dealer reminds her that they are one person. The dealer cannot give her
back the looks she had at the beginning but offers to stop the experiment
so that Elizabeth won't have the same problem again with Sue missing the
seventh day. Elizabeth is going crazy. When she switches to Sue, Sue realizes
that the apartment is a mess. Angry, she decides to extend her existence
well beyond the seven days by extracting as much fluid from
Elisabeth as possible and storing it in glass jars.
Three months later it's the day before the New Year's Eve show.
She has a boyfriend over.
Sue suddenly realizes that she's run out of fluid.
She desperately calls the dealer
but is told that the only way to get more fluid is to switch back to being
Elizabeth. Sue is furious but she has no choice. As she switches back to
Elizabeth, she sees that she has become a horrible old woman.
She hides in the bathroom and scares the boyfriend away.
Elizabeth can't believe what she has become. She finally calls the dealer and
asks to terminate the experiment. The dealer delivers a termination
serum and starts injecting it into Sue's body but then stops,
still craving fame and youth.
Sue comes back alive and the two women confront each other: seeing that
Elizabeth tries to terminate her, Sue murders Elizabeth (a lengthy brutal scene)..
Sue then walks to the studio for the New Year's Eve show as if nothing has happened, except that she starts losing teeth, nails, an ear...
Sue rushes back to her apartment and tries something desperate: use the original substance to create a younger version of herself, just like Elizabeth created Sue. But the experiment fails miserably, as the substance can only be used once.
Sue becomes a horrible limping two-headed monster.
Nevertheless, she wears the costume for the show and starts walking back towards
the studio.
It is not clear if the rest is a nightmare or really happens.
She reaches the studio, nobody notices that she is a monster, walks on
stage, terrorizes the audience, gets beheaded by someone, her body spits blood
all over the audience, her decapitated body escapes.
Her body explodes in the street where the "walk of fame" is. A piece of flesh with Elisabeth's face embedded in it crawls to Elizabeth's star and starts melting.
In the morning the bloody stain on the star is wiped away
by a worker operating a vacuum cleaner.
(Copyright © 2019 Piero Scaruffi | Terms of use )
|
|
