What would you say if you could talk to your younger self? Would you warn them about 9/11 or just tell them to buy stock in Netflix and Zoom? How disappointing must it be to meet the older you and get an early glimpse of how your wildest dreams inevitably settled down into an ordinary life? In a funny fluke of the release calendar, two recent film festival favorites on this subject are opening in Greater Boston this weekend.
Writer-director Megan Park’s mild-mannered Sundance hit “My Old Ass” is about a recent high school graduate (played by Maisy Stella of TV’s “Nashville”) who hallucinates a visit from her 39-year-old self (Aubrey Plaza) while tripping on magic mushrooms. On the edgier end of the spectrum, Coralie Fargeat’s splattery Cannes sensation “The Substance” finds an unemployed, 50-something actress (Demi Moore) birthing a younger, hotter and more malevolent version of herself (Margaret Qualley) thanks to an experimental cosmetic serum. One film offers innocuous life lessons, the other results in a battle to the death. I quite enjoyed the gross, violent one.
In a year of terrible titles like “Good One” and “Daddio,” the trophy for the worst goes to “My Old Ass,” a name that not only suggests a raunchy comedy completely out of step with the movie’s Hallmark channel temperament, but also caused countless headaches for the poor publicist who had to ask me, “Have you seen ‘My Old Ass’ yet?” Misleadingly marketed as an Aubrey Plaza vehicle — she only shows up for two scenes — the movie sticks with Maisy Stella’s Elliott, a cloyingly cute, 18-year-old lesbian aching to flee her family’s cranberry farm for the bright lights of Toronto. But all of Elliott’s big plans and preconceived notions about her sexuality are called into question when she finds herself falling for a gentlemanly young farmhand named Chad (Percy Hynes White), despite the adamant warnings from her older self to stay away from boys named Chad.
“My Old Ass” tries to have fun with the fact that the two actresses playing Elliott in no way resemble each other physically. When our young protagonist points out the gap in her older counterpart’s teeth, Plaza replies, “F— you, wear your retainer.” But the mismatch runs deeper than dentistry. Stella’s giving one of those insufferable showbiz kid performances, her antsy, eager-to-please energy the polar opposite of Plaza’s trademark affectlessness. There’s simply no way to believe these two could ever be the same person. (Stella seems to be auditioning for “The JoJo Siwa Story,” while the obvious choice for a younger Aubrey Plaza would be Jenna Ortega, who actually starred in director Park’s first film, “The Fallout,” but must have been too busy with “Beetlejuice” sequel duties for this one.)
The movie isn’t much interested in exploring its central gimmick — I’m not sure if I should be annoyed or grateful that it doesn’t try to explain how these two are able to text each other — and most of “My Old Ass” is content to be a treacly teen love story between a dull young man with no faults and an irritating girl with poor priorities ignoring advice from the future. It’s like Francis Ford Coppola’s “Peggy Sue Got Married” without the wisdom. MGM’s new owners at Amazon have been ruthless about shunting its films straight to streaming, so it’s a surprise to see “My Old Ass” getting a theatrical release, especially since it boasts all the production value and visual sophistication of a very special episode of “Dawson’s Creek.” I wish my older self had shown up and warned me to skip it.
After being dropped by original distributor Universal Studios, “The Substance” is getting an uncharacteristically wide release from the upstart arthouse mavens at MUBI. Watching it, one can see why a major studio might have chickened out, as this is not a movie for the timid. Director Fargeat’s 2017 “Revenge” was one of the more exuberantly disgusting debuts we’ve seen in some time, spilling so much blood in its final sequence that characters kept slipping on it and further injuring themselves. “The Substance” is even ickier, its grand finale bursting with such vast quantities of gurgling viscera that even the most squeamish viewers may find themselves cackling at the sheer effrontery. But the movie is sickening in a productive way, using outré body horror techniques to address the cruelty of contemporary beauty standards and the self-loathing that festers in our appearance-obsessed age. It can be a little stupid sometimes and at 140 minutes it’s egregiously overlong, but “The Substance” is about something, and it’s alive.
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Demi Moore stars as Elisabeth Sparkle, who we’re told was once an Oscar-winning actress, but is now known primarily as a fitness guru. Fargeat cleverly conveys Elisabeth’s sinking fortunes during the opening credits by showing her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame falling into disrepair. Fired from her popular morning exercise program by a piggish producer pointedly named “Harvey” (a miscast Dennis Quaid, mugging mercilessly), Elisabeth conspires to stay in the spotlight by injecting herself with a black market beauty aid that sends a fresh-faced doppelganger (Qualley) crawling out of her spinal column. According to the instructions, these two need to maintain a segregated, symbiotic existence, trading places on a week-by-week basis while the other lies inert in the closet like a Botoxed Dorian Gray. But Elisabeth has never been one to share the spotlight.
Moore gives a performance that will be correctly described as fearless, and not just because of how much of the movie the 61-year-old actress spends in the nude. She’s never been bashful about the work it takes for her to look the way she does, causing small scandals in the past by being open about her breast augmentations and posing naked while pregnant for magazine covers. Moore’s arduous physical transformations for movies like “Striptease” and “G.I. Jane” garnered more attention than the films themselves. In many respects, the role of Elisabeth can be seen as the culmination of a career spent obsessed with the ways we look at women, which is especially poignant now that Hollywood seems to have no use for her anymore. I mean, when was the last time you saw a Demi Moore movie?
In an era when people regularly inject botulism into their foreheads to freeze their faces, the brutal grotesquerie of “The Substance” isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds in taking the ugly things we do to be beautiful to their illogical extremes. But Fargeat’s pretty adamant about stamping it as an allegory anyway, with the heavily stylized production full of impossibly long hallways and interior spaces the size of football fields. She loves shooting with a distorted, fisheye lens, the male characters leaning too close into the camera to look as repulsive as possible. Women’s bodies are ogled and fetishized, cut up into closeups of discrete parts, with so many shots of Qualley’s rear end I think we see it more than we see her face. (It’s funny that this isn’t the movie opening this week called “My Old Ass.”) One also can’t help but notice that the younger actress has been digitally enlarged in certain areas to match Moore’s pneumatic proportions, which adds a whole other angle to the movie’s views on objectification.
Moore brings a wounded humanity amid the piling indignities, photographed in a way that accentuates her lip fillers and other alterations. She’s always been such a poised, Teflon screen presence, I don’t think I’ve ever seen her allow herself to be so vulnerable onscreen. The most heartbreaking scene finds Elisabeth getting ready to go out on a date, looking elegant and beautiful but feeling less so, taunted by a billboard of Qualley and the lost luster of her earlier years. She keeps stopping on her way out of the apartment to add a little more makeup, adjusting her outfit to dress a little more provocatively, attempting to overcompensate until she eventually ends up looking like a gargoyle. That’s the story of the movie right there. It’s the story of our whole rotten culture.
“My Old Ass” and “The Substance” are now playing in theaters.