So far this year, there have been a flurry of films and TV shows centred on Hollywood stalwarts over 40: there’s Anne Hathaway looking luminous as she falls for Nicholas Galitzine in The Idea of You; Angelina Jolie bathed in an otherworldly golden light for the duration of Maria; Cate Blanchett projecting power and sophistication in Disclaimer; and Ruth Negga stealing the show in Presumed Innocent, to name but a few.
In many, if not all, of their scenes, these Oscar-winners and nominees get to radiate glamour and sex appeal—and why shouldn’t they? But alongside such glossy depictions of middle age, I’ve also been thrilled by a new set of releases from a trio of 40-something female directors that explore the knottiness of aging as a woman—holding a mirror up to society’s unattainable beauty standards and, in certain cases, gleefully smashing them to smithereens.
The first is The Substance, Coralie Fargeat’s eardrum-bursting scream of a film, which revels in cackling at the ridiculousness of everything the world expects women to be and do. It centres on Demi Moore’s Elisabeth Sparkle, a washed-up movie star whose cartoonishly misogynistic boss (Dennis Quaid) decides that she has aged out of her starring role in an ’80s-style fitness show. The decision to replace her with a younger, hotter model breeds a crippling insecurity in her that prompts her to try “the substance,” a procedure that promises to unleash a more perfect version of herself.
And so it does: After she injects herself with a mysterious green liquid, her alter-ego, Margaret Qualley’s Sue, literally crawls out of her skin. But only one version of Elisabeth can exist at a time: While Sue glides through Los Angeles in her shiny, skin-tight lycra, snagging the part of Elisabeth’s replacement with little more than a flutter of her eyelashes, the original Elisabeth lies unconscious, crumpled in a heap on her bathroom floor.
When it’s Sue’s turn to rest, Elisabeth emerges, but finds herself falling into a deep depression. She compares her body to Sue’s, bristling at her perkiness and vitality. A new billboard featuring a coquettish Sue looms outside her apartment window, and she feels it taunting her as she gets ready for a date. She tries on countless outfits and changes her hair, but Elisabeth’s self-loathing eventually gets the better of her, leading her to spiral until she smears make-up all over her face.
She soon starts to test the limits of her double life, remaining in Sue’s body for longer than sanctioned. This prove disastrous, causing Elisabeth to age rapidly when she later returns to her own skin: First, it’s a single wizened finger, which she hides inside a glove, and then more limbs and body parts until, suddenly, she’s a hunchbacked hag swaddled in a headscarf and sunglasses like a demented Queen Elizabeth II.
Strangely, it’s in this guise that Elisabeth’s eternal self-consciousness finally falls by the wayside—she’s been pushed to the absolute edge by the demands of our youth-obsessed culture and now, she has nothing left to give. It’s a barnstorming, terrifying, and oddly hilarious actualisation of how women are often made to feel when we don’t live up to the airbrushed ideals constantly being broadcast to us.
Grappling with the same impossible societal expectations is Nicole Kidman’s Romy Mathis, the CEO of a robotics firm who falls for a cocky intern (Harris Dickinson) in Halina Reijn’s twisted, sultry Babygirl, which recently debuted at the Venice Film Festival. As the public face of her company, she needs to be both relatable and aspirational, a boundary-pushing pioneer but also entirely unimpeachable. In one sequence, we see her jumping through all the hoops that she and those around her have deemed necessary for her survival and advancement in such a role: she gets intensive therapy, does cryo, and has her face injected with botox.
Seeing this onscreen—a simple procedure that nearly everyone in Hollywood has had, but is still whispered about and rarely acknowledged—feels groundbreaking in and of itself, but the film goes even further: In a later scene, Romy’s teenage daughter (Esther McGregor) actually laughs at her cosmetic surgery. “Why do you do this to yourself?” she wails, pouting her lips exaggeratedly to mimic her mother. “You look like a dead fish.” Romy doesn’t react, but we know it gets to her—we see her examining her own reflection, quietly concerned, soon after.
In a film crammed with jaw-dropping, transgressive sex scenes, this is still the bravest and most exposing thing Kidman does. Historically, Hollywood stars have faced down duelling expectations to both resist getting visibly older and to eschew the kinds of invasive treatments that might make them look “unnatural”—and Babygirl confronts that hypocrisy directly. Similarly, in The Substance, although Elisabeth’s efforts to stay wrinkle-free aren’t telegraphed to the audience as plainly, Moore’s unlined, carefully contoured face and glossy pout make it clear that her character has done everything in her power to look as young as possible for as long as possible, only to be cast aside anyway.
In Marielle Heller’s Nightbitch, which screened earlier this month at the Toronto International Film Festival, Amy Adams’s unnamed protagonist takes a strikingly different approach to getting older, though it’s no less traumatic. Driven mad by her new responsibilities as a stay-at-home mother—to a point where she ultimately finds herself, erm, transforming into a dog—she is seen, like Moore’s Elisabeth and Kidman’s Romy, consulting her own appearance in the bathroom mirror in an early scene. She feels run-down, her locks unkempt, wrinkles emerging, and long hairs growing in surprising places. “We are where we are,” she sighs.
Then, things quickly take a surreal turn: She discovers tufts of white hair on her lower back, and then a small bump. When she prods it, pus leaks out and a small gray tail emerges. Later, she grows six extra teats on her stomach. Adams only shrugs—after everything that motherhood, and womanhood, has already inflicted on her character’s body, nothing seems to surprise her anymore.
Like The Substance, Nightbitch delights in the flaws and occasional disgustingness of its leading lady’s physical form, revealing a more raw and vulnerable side of a Hollywood fixture who we may otherwise only see as an impossibly elegant, almost mythical creature floating down red carpets.
Naturally, it goes without saying that Moore, Kidman, and Adams are all exceptionally beautiful and privileged. In truth, nothing about them is attainable, but their willingness to delve into the less palatable, and sometimes downright ugly, realities of growing older as a woman—the ageism, the self-doubt, the endless upkeep, the frantic desire to keep up with your peers and make it all look easy in a bid to meet the expectations the world thrusts upon you—is significant, too. It confirms to women in their 40s, 50s, 60s, and beyond—those who’ve always been chronically underserved by the film industry, and given idealised representations of themselves, if anything at all—that many of their most painful, private experiences are entirely universal. There’s no need for them to be perfect, and it isn’t something they should have to aspire to.
So, I hope more truly wacky and challenging releases follow in the footsteps of these three firecrackers. I expect it’ll take decades for us to fully dismantle our existing notions of beauty on screen, but at least we’re slowly moving in the right direction.
This story was originally published on Vogue.com.
