Reviews: 'Megalopolis' and 'The Substance'
A look at two ambitious, provocative new films from Francis Ford Coppola and Coralie Fargeat
Megalopolis
Francis Ford Coppola’s self-financed epic Megalopolis is as bewildering as it is exhilarating.
In various stages of conception for over 40 years, the movie arrives in a film ecosystem that seems openly hostile to its very existence. This is a movie that wears its massive heart and cinematic influences on its sleeve.
It favors winding philosophical digressions copied straight from numerous texts over narrative momentum or cohesion, and nearly every actor who is reciting those lines seems like they are performing in a different film.
I liked it.
Megalopolis is set in a New York City/Ancient Rome retrofuture hybrid called New Rome, where the architect Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) and Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) are having a great debate about the future.
Cesar won the Nobel Prize for creating Megalon, a miraculous substance that can take on many forms and enhance nearly everything it touches. It can heal bullet wounds and broken bones, be harnessed into great utopian city structures, and help people see the future.
Cesar, who also possesses a magical ability to stop time, wants to use Megalon to build New Rome into a utopian paradise. Because the city is already deeply in debt and barely keeping its head above water, Mayor Cicero vehemently opposes him and is more interested in maintaining the status quo.
Caught in the middle of this fiery central conflict is Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), Cicero’s daughter and Cesar’s eventual love interest. Emmanuel’s performance, with routinely flat line readings and bizarre on-again, off-again attempts at a New Yorker accent, threatens to throw the movie off its axis nearly every time she’s on screen.
Thankfully, there are also a great many supporting characters weaving in and out of the story. The high watermark is Aubrey Plaza as a conniving financial correspondent named Wow Platinum. She dons a different Classic Hollywood-inspired costume nearly every time she shows up to infiltrate the upper echelons of New Rome’s power players, and nearly walks away with the film.
Much like the two performances I just mentioned, Megalopolis is a film of extremes; its highs are quite incredible, its lows bafflingly inert.
What ultimately sustains it is Coppola’s reinvigorating sense of aesthetic freedom. Watching it I was reminded of the Star Wars prequel trilogy as well as two other semi-recent films: Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq and Steven Soderbergh’s Unsane.
All of these films are fueled by a sense of liberated artistry, of unshackled ambition, confrontational political messages, the evolution of filmmaking tools, or a combination of the three. In other words, they are Big Swings.
The Substance
Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance is a brutal body horror film about self-hatred and self-destruction set (where else?) in Los Angeles.
It is the story of Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a once acclaimed and admired cog in the Hollywood machine who finds herself unceremoniously discarded from her on-air workout show after she passes the age of 50.
The L.A. of The Substance is unburdened by time, even if Elisabeth is anything but. Its two primary locales are defined by their hermetically sealed vintage aesthetic. There’s a film studio that has claustrophobically narrow hallways with carpet straight out of The Shining, and Elisabeth’s retro-looking condo feels more like a tastefully decorated prison.
Her home has a large window with a view dominated by a billboard that serves as a torturous mirror of her sudden irrelevancy. On the wall opposite that window is a gigantic portrait of Elisabeth, another reminder of fast-fading glory days.
Shortly after being booted from her day job, Elisabeth gets in a car crash. She’s uninjured but taken to the hospital, where an attendant turns her on to an illegal experimental drug called The Substance, a one-time injection that will create a younger version of herself (Margaret Qualley).
She can live as this new person, who calls herself Sue, for a week before switching back to her original body for the next week; rinse and repeat.
Sue is able to easily reclaim Elisabeth’s mantle as a fitness instructor, and Harvey (Dennis Quaid), the aptly-named sexist pig who runs the studio, reformats the show to scrutinize her younger body.
Fargeat’s camera follows suit. She shoots these sequences with a hilariously over-the-top focus on Sue’s pelvic thrusts and gyrating ass. It takes what eroticism there is in the images and wipes it out; it’s potent satire at first, but the more Fargeat beats you over the head with it the less it works.
The same could be said for much of the rest of the film: It begins as a sad, lacerating portrait of a woman being aged out of her passion and livelihood that descends into a rowdy, off-the-rails gorefest.
Sue isn’t happy with living a week at a time. She breaks The Substance’s strict medication guidelines and begins staying longer and longer, leaving Elisabeth to deal with the rapid, irreversible consequences.
Fargeat has a knack for squirm-inducing mutilation: The scene where Elisabeth injects herself with The Substance and births Sue out of a giant slit in her back is breathtakingly grotesque. So too is the scene that immediately follows, where Sue sews Elisabeth’s giant wound back up with a needle and thread provided by the mysterious corporation behind the drug.
It eventually gets much, much gorier, though the longer it went on, the less I really cared. I would’ve liked to see Fargeat use such an expansive canvas to deepen either character psychology or her premise. Instead, The Substance is a successful provocation and little else. Its skin-deep pleasures, and excellent performances from Moore and Qualley, are enough to sustain the movie but not enough to make it soar.
Megalopolis opens in theaters Sept. 27. The Substance is now in theaters.