The fountain of youth turns red

Elisabeth is a former star, who is now happy doing her exercise show, but soon enough, she hears that her chauvinist boss (played by Dennis Quaid) is looking for a younger replacement. She escapes a near-fatal accident and, in the process, chances upon an ad for something called The Substance. It can create a younger version of herself by injecting the activator. Every seven days, the original must swap roles with the doppelgänger. Is it safe? What are the consequences?

Elisabeth does not have much time to mull over these questions. Desperate, she quietly returns to her huge Los Angeles apartment (excellently designed by Stanislas Reydellet), which boasts huge glass walls that provide a bird’ s-eye view of the city. The space distinguishes her loneliness as tragically immense and unforgiving. She decides to take the substance, and then it emerges, tearing her backbone apart: her replacement is a much younger woman played by a pitch-perfect Margaret Qualley. She is Sue.

Demi Moore gives career-best performance

Sue swaps her role as the new face doing those same exercise routines, and her instant rise to stardom means she needs more time and more days. This also means working a little around the rules of using The Substance. Elisabeth begins to resent Sue midway, which forms some of the most hard-hitting scenes in The Substance- away from its all-out bloodied unsubtlety towards the second half. Moore, in her finest hour on screen, is devastating to watch as her self-worth fades away gradually, distilled in this particular scene where she gets ready to meet the one person who has been kind to her for a change. Elisabeth’s own insecurity is the real horror, as she proceeds to smudge it all off with her bare, harsh hands.

Final thoughts

The Substance loses some of that restraint and reflectiveness during the last hour, when Fargeat seems to take the body horror to such an extreme that it glosses over its own critique of ageing and the sexist male gaze. However, it is still relentlessly violent, gruesome, and sickly funny to experience the havoc that happens, thanks to the instantly memorable work of prosthetics and makeup effects designer Pierre-Olivier Persin.

Ultimately, I was left troubled with the body politics of The Substance, a film that only wants to critique what it means to age and unlove oneself. Fargeat’s vision is laced with a riotous fury and audaciousness that gives it back to the establishment that sets these absurd beauty standards. But does it do better in deconstructing this very idea of what ageing looks like in a vastly judgmental world? The dizzying, off-the-rails ending is a problem here because it places the consequences firmly on the feet of the woman herself. She has nowhere to hide, nowhere to go. It is her biggest nightmare come true- facing the world with a frightening version of herself.

Behind the severe shock value, The Substance does little to amplify Elisabeth’s desperation and agony. Who is Elisabeth when she is not defined by the disillusionment brought in by her ageing? Elisabeth exists in this one myopic fulcrum of judgment. So she punishes herself more and more as the film progresses. Suffering and slowly driven to madness. The Substance might as well be treated like a blood-soaked question mark on the unrealistic beauty standards that continue to plague the showbiz.

The Substance is streaming on Mubi.

BOTTOM LINE
Luck Favors Baskhar

RATING
2.75/5

CENSOR
U/A, 2h 30m

What Is the Film About?

Baskhar (Dulquar Salman) is an ordinary guy with a near-poor life. He works as a cashier at Maghada Bank in Bombay. The financial circumstances around him eventually force him to take the wrong path. The movie’s basic story is what happens when Bashkar takes the wrong route and how it impacts him and his family.

Performances

Dulquar Salman perfectly fits Baskhar’s role. The film offers him dual shades primarily and other small variations making it a well-rounded affair for him.

It also helps that Dulquar Salman’s is the only character in the movie with a proper character arc. From a simple guy to a greedy ultra-rich person, the transition is neatly and naturally conveyed without any exaggerated emotions. He sails through the proceedings with his natural charm and style and with subtle emotions. Be it anger, frustration or extreme happiness, there is always an economy in emotion and it’s well captured.

Meenakshi Choudhary gets a decent role. She looks good and has a couple of moments to show her dramatic skills. They are simple and do the trick for her.

Analysis

Venky Atluri of Tholi Prema and Sir fame directs Lucky Baskhar. It is a rags-to-riches narrative which also includes the side effects of becoming greedy. Basically, it is a tale of greed and the retribution of a common man.

Lucky Baskhar takes time to establish the world the story is set in. It has two distinctive tracks within it, one is the family and the other is related to the banking sector. These two form the core plot elements the movie handles, they are family emotions and financial crimes.

The family emotions aspect of the movie is routine. We have seen it many times before. However, the good thing is the director swiftly moves through this predictability without too much lag. The birthday sequence where the wife gets hurt, the tearing up of the pocket, for example, conveys it clearly.

The criminal aspect offers freshness to the routine setup. The first half deals with smuggling via importing stuff. These parts offer newness as a background, but narrative speaking they happen very conveniently for the hero. He faces no challenge at all and is prepared well in advance.

What that does is, despite the fresh backdrop and something new on offer, the depth is missing and therefore the expected high is not reached. A flat sense prevails. Again, like the emotional track, there is hardly any lag. Things move swiftly with a smooth screenplay which keeps the curiosity alive. The pre-interval and interval segments help in maintaining the same.

Post-interval is where things get exciting as the stakes become higher. The financial crime aspect adds to the novelty. The business jargon is used just enough to make things look a little authentic and not overdone to make things confusing. A balance is achieved which helps navigate the proceedings without taxing the brain much.

Things go on a predictable path, but some of the payoff related to the ‘monetary’ aspect that’s established previously helps the flow. The spending of 69 lakhs in a single day is such a sequence.

The real deal with the movie arrives via the character arc of Baskhar during the second half. The change in personality due to greed, the realisation and the eventual transformation to normal are neatly done. The scene with the father during this portion is the clincher as far as Lucky Baskhar’s fate with the audience goes. What happens later is just icing on the cake tying all the threads. The stretch towards the climax is a little lengthy but satisfying.

Overall, Lucky Baskhar has a straightforward story that is easy to predict. There’s no real challenge for the hero, but the engaging screenplay and interesting narrative make up for it by keeping us involved in how the events unfold. Watch it if you like crime narratives with routine drama embedded in them.

Performances by Others Actors

Lucky Bashkar is filled with artists. You have many people filling up different worlds. But, none among them have well-defined parts. They are bits and pieces roles and chip in as per the requirement and then disappear, to then appear much later reminding us of their presence.

Among the many, Tinu Anand, Rajkumaar, AVPL Tatha etc manage to register. They all have minor parts but play a key role in taking things forward.

Music and Other Departments?

GV Prakash provides the music and background score for the movie. The musician doesn’t deliver on the songs front, but makes up for it a little bit via the BGM. It is loud and blaring, but serves the purpose.

Technically the movie is slick with neat cuts, frames and art work. The cinematography is consistently good and adds to the vintage feel. The editing is neat. The predictable moments, especially in drama, don’t overstay to cause irritation. The writing is adequate. Nothing stands out, but there isn’t much to complain about as well. The production values are good. The movie bears a visually striking look.

Highlights?

Dulquar Salman

Backdrop

Second Half

Pre Climax

Drawbacks?

Predictable Narrative

Parts Of First Half

No Real Threat For Hero

Did I Enjoy It?

Yes

Will You Recommend It?

Yes

There is so much going on in “Emilia Pérez,” the audacious musical/melodrama/crime-thriller from filmmaker Jacques Audiard, it’s impossible not to appreciate the sheer ambition of it all.

There is obvious craft and moments of true transcendence, beauty and horror. Set around Mexico City, this is a movie about family, about ambition, about the possibility of change, cartels, human disappearances, gender-affirmation, money and corruption.

Sometimes the characters break into fantastical musical numbers: Some are filled with rage, others with joy and hope. Other times the songs come out in barely a whisper. And yet even with all that life and color and passion on screen, there’s a distinct rift between all those big emotions that the characters are cycling through and what the audience is feeling, which is practically nothing. It’s almost as if “Emilia Pérez” forgot to invite us along for the ride.

And it is quite a ride: One day a cartel boss named Manitas ( Karla Sofía Gascón ) has a smart, but undervalued lawyer Rita Mora Castro ( Zoe Saldaña ) kidnapped. Manitas wants gender confirmation surgery, and for Rita to handle the logistics: Hiring the discreet surgeon, faking Manitas’ death and transporting the wife, Jessi ( Selena Gomez ) and two kids to their new home in Switzerland. In return, Rita will get rich. Somehow, this is only the first act.

Four years later, Rita’s gotten a glow up. Gone are her bush eyebrows and frumpy suit, replaced with the kind of grooming only money and genetics like Saldaña’s can produce. And she’s leading a cosmopolitan life in London, something that we get to see all too briefly, when she meets another woman who’s gone through a major transformation, Emilia Pérez (Gascón).

Audiard plays briefly with the idea that Rita assumes Emilia is there to kill her, to rid the world of any remaining evidence of those who know what happened. In actuality, she just misses her kids and wants them back in Mexico to live with her. It’s up to Rita to get them to move once more, in with Emilia, posing as an aunt they’ve never met before if you’re wondering where all those “Mrs. Doubtfire” comparisons come into play. ( The bloody “Sicario” stuff is yet to come).

Saldaña lends a captivating fierceness to Rita, despite being a terribly underwritten character. It’s strange to spend so much time with someone and feel entirely detached from who they are and what they want. She just follows others around, a receptacle for everyone else’s decisions with little arc or agency of her own.

Early on in the film Rita debates (in song) with a plastic surgeon in Hong Kong about whether or not changing the body has any effect on the soul. He doesn’t think so. She does, and even goes a step further, singing “changing the soul changes society, changing society changes everything.” It’s a lovely idea that the film handles clumsily in its maximalist, go-for-broke way that values massive set-pieces and high drama over authentic emotion.

At first Emilia seems entirely changed, no longer the vindictive, jealous, violent cartel leader she once was. She is soft spoken, empathetic and happy. She starts a foundation to find all the disappeared people and give their families the chance of a proper burial and farewell. She even finds love. And yet she can’t handle watching Jessi move on. It’s the stuff of soap operas — and not necessarily the fun ones. Here, it could even read as dangerously reductive.

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Jessi sometimes feels like she’s part of an entirely different film, or rather a music video that seems to be paying homage somehow to Pedro Almodóvar, David Lynch and Robert Rodriguez. It is fun and wild at times, and Gomez fully commits to the bit of this woman who is being gaslit into insanity. But she and the film crescendo into absurdity, with little in the way of relief or catharsis. After all those big ideas, all those grand themes and genre-subverting gestures, we’re left with shockingly little to hold on to.

“Emilia Pérez,” a Netflix release in theaters Friday and streaming on Nov. 13, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for “some violent content, sexual material, language.” Running time: 132 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.