Substance abuse

What are we to make of the French director’s latest assault on the senses? Fargeat is of course commenting on the tyranny of ideals of youth and beauty over females through the media, ideals which have been created for the gratification of the male consumer; consequently every male character is a scumbag (Quaid is even given an asshole for a mouth, in case we don't get the point). Conversely, the female characters (and there is only one really) seem incapable of decision-making based on anything but denying an inescapable biological process: love is absent. Whether the director is arguing that Elizabeth Sparkle should have been having babies is a moot point: the film spends too much time (and resources) underlining media vacuity, binge eating, and consumer waste for us to know. Indeed, realism is almost immediately jettisoned in favour of sharing the perspective of Elizabeth's Sparkle's unhinged personality (telescoping corridors, graphic close-ups), allowing us to ignore small details such as the ease with which she shuttles between home, the studio and her substance drop-box, and her spotless refit of the bathroom to tidy away her other self, Dorian Gray-style.

The film also ignores the fact that women do actually love to dress up and look good; it’s not all societal encoding. In the end, though, your walk-away from this astonishingly brave polemic on our image-based culture will be formed by your reaction to the film’s closing half-hour of splatter-gore. The closing shot of a disembodied face over a walk-of-fame pavement star recalls an earlier one of a dropped hamburger, an epitome of the film’s aesthetic argument.