The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024): United Kingdom | France | United States
Reviewed by Larry Gleeson. Viewed for Cinema Society screening at the Riviera Theatre
“Have you ever dreamt of a better version of yourself? You. Only better in every way. Seriously. You’ve got to try this new product. It’s called The Substance.”
Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good…I went to the Riviera Theatre to watch The Substance. It turned out to be a SBIFF Cinema Society ($$) screening. By the time I entered the screening. The few remaining seats were upfront.Viewing The Substance from the front row would be akin to viewing a Cinerama from the front row. I had extreme reactions from a feeling I was about to vomit to a deep feeling of ecstatic joy from the visual stimulations – utterly unparallelled in my experience. The Substance vacillates between drama, psychological horror, dark comedy, monster horror, and body horror.Admittedly, I had not experienced much cinema in the form of body horror until recently. I had the distinct pleasure of seeing David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds at the recent AFI FEST 2o24 at the TC Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, Calif.
Writer/Director Coralie Fargeat has created a
California Dreamin’: Hollywood’s Filmic Class Consciousness Represented in Parasite, Harlan County, U.S.A., and Hoffa (1992)
Paper by Larry Gleeson.
The imbalance of power created through the exploitation of the working class, and the attempts by individuals to overcome the vast economic disparity between the working class and the capitalist class are represented in the films, Parasite, Harlan County, U.S.A., and Hoffa (1992). Director Bong-ho through the film Parasite, provides social commentary on globalization in contrasting two families, in an upstairs/downstairs, upper class-lower-class, framework. The Parks represent the upper-class capitalists, surviving on the labor carried out by the Kim family who are indicative of the lower working class. Hoffa (1992), on the other hand, creates a vivid, compelling portrait of large-scale class warfare, from angry confrontations between the Teamster labor union truck drivers and management from the 1930’s through the Red Scare and into the violent 1970’s. Barbara Kopple’s 1976 documentary, Harlan County, U.S.A., provides an intimate look at a striking Eastern Kentucky labor union, United Mine Workers, coal miners and their violent fight with bottom-line-minded capitalist corporations, corrupt public officials, and gun-wielding anti-strike thugs. Through a comparison and contrast of these three films, two narrative films and one documentary film,
