The Substance

THE SUBSTANCE   **1/2

Coralie Fargeat

2024

IDEA:  An aging, washed-up Hollywood star takes a black-market drug that produces a younger, more physically perfect version of herself, but there are unwanted side effects.

BLURB:  The Substance is the kind of boldfaced satire that forsakes subtlety, nuance, and realism in favor of pile-driving home its message in as uncomplicated a way as possible. There is almost nothing about that message that can’t already be gleaned from a plot synopsis, leaving the film to stretch out and embellish a pretty basic cautionary tale - be careful what you wish for! - for a gratuitously distended two-plus hours. Because the universe of The Substance is hardly congruent with anything resembling the real world (friends, family, and curiosity apparently don't exist in the life of a celebrity), Fargeat basically forces us to take her film less as the incisive social satire it sometimes pretends to be than as the big, dumb, sardonic, occasionally inspired, über-polished exploitation picture it really is. And on those grounds, it’s fairly successful. A triumph of visual and sonic design, the film furnishes an indulgent, pungent sensory experience befitting its corporeal obsessions. Marvel at the spacious, ominously antiseptic Kubrickian rooms! Immerse yourself in a symphony of squishy body sounds! Give over all your senses (and the contents of your stomach?) to the lurid, uncannily convincing makeup and prosthetic effects, putrid masterpieces of rotting, deformed flesh and oozing entrails. It’s certainly a spectacle, and by the time it reaches a splatter-fest of a denouement that would undoubtedly delight David Cronenberg and John Carpenter, one that feels far more content with being just that than anything that might dig deeper under the skin. Is it unforgivably ironic, or ironic by design, that The Substance doesn’t exactly have that much of it?

Between the Temples

BETWEEN THE TEMPLES   ***

Nathan Silver

2024

IDEA:  Amid personal and professional crisis, a cantor reluctantly agrees to give his former grade-school music teacher a late-in-life bat mitzvah. 

BLURB:  Between the Temples is a film of deliberately discordant tones and abrasive affect that is, at heart, a warm character study of two bereft individuals finding renewed purpose through each other. Which is another way of saying that the film exists between modes of filmmaking - acrid contemporary cringe comedy and relatively crowd-pleasing New Hollywood - just as its characters find themselves caught between traditional notions of Judaism and far less orthodox ones. The conservative and more adventurous (reform?) dimensions of Between the Temples come together in electric and productively awkward conversation, creating a volatile energy that feels at once old and new. While Silver’s 16mm cinematography and iris shots evoke the past, his penchant for fast, arrhythmic editing, handheld camerawork, and a cacophonous soundscape of quotidian noises amped up to 11 align him with the vérité working-class chaos of the Safdie brothers. Extreme closeups predominate, compounding the claustrophobia of the always discomfiting social situations Jason Schwartzman’s Ben has a habit of finding himself in. The film’s antsy, febrile atmosphere is enhanced by the terrific cast, especially Carol Kane, whose presence is so potently batty it has the effect of shifting the climate of any scene she enters. Her looniness is the perfect foil and complement to Schwartzman’s nebbishy sullenness; where their relationship ends up is Between the Temples’ final and most satisfying rejection of orthodoxy.

Brewster McCloud

BREWSTER MCCLOUD   ***1/2

Robert Altman

1970

IDEA:  In a fallout shelter under the Houston Astrodome, a hermetic young man builds a winged contraption in the hopes of taking flight. Meanwhile, outside, the police investigate a series of murders marked by bird droppings.

BLURB:  Altman’s M*A*S*H follow-up, like many of his best works to come, is a rowdily witty satire that moves according to its own off-kilter rhythms and free-associative, self-reflexive logic. It’s a dense, dialectical tapestry of images and sounds that feel as though they threaten to outpace our comprehension, but not without thrilling us with sheer cinematic verve and ingenuity. In his trademark overlapping dialogue, lively soundtrack, madcap crosscutting, and crash zooms, Altman serves up an apposite expression of an antic, maddening post-1960s American zeitgeist. His targets are as numerous as the metaphors and allusions that spatter his film like the ever-present bird shit: nationalism, capitalism, corrupt politicians, inept law enforcement, racists, Texas gun culture, and, above all, the conservative establishment that enables them all. Brewster McCloud has a pretty straightforward plot, but its pleasures are all in its anarchic form, a sui generis mishmash of police procedural, coming-of-age, and fantasy tropes with a trendy Bullitt-esque car chase sequence for good measure. It may be far from Altman’s most refined or richly character-driven film - Bud Cort’s titular flight-obsessed loner is just about as anonymous as his proto-Waldo getup suggests - but Brewster McCloud never fails to delight in its shaggy and mordantly irreverent ways.