“When did you Do you feel excluded by your age for the first time?”

You knew that question would be asked in some form – it was really just a question of when and if it would be asked before the inevitable question about all the nudity was asked. Seven minutes into the Cannes Film Festival press conference for The substance, In writer-director Coralie Fargeat’s extraordinary, extremely gory body horror film, a journalist asked the film’s star to talk about how she was shut out of Hollywood because she’s a woman over 40. The fact that the film’s story revolves around an actress of a certain age who feels she has to do whatever it takes to stay forever young added an extra layer of self-consciousness to the proceedings. The fact that the person answering the question was Demi Moore multiplied the meta factor a hundredfold.

“The real problem is how you handle the subject,” Moore replied with the calm of a diplomat. “What I liked about Coralie’s piece is that it’s about the male perspective of the idealized woman that we’ve adopted as (women)… Here this newer, younger, better version gets a chance, and she repeats the same pattern. She’s still looking for external validation.”

For those who haven’t heard yet: The substance is about a former Oscar winner and A-list superstar who reinvented herself as a TV fitness guru several decades ago. She is unceremoniously sidelined due to her repulsive caricature of a boss and a business obsessed with the bloom of youth. A program designed to unleash the “newer, younger, better version” in her does just that, in the form of a dewy twenty-something (played by Margaret Qualley) who springs from the older woman’s body. The idea is to reclaim her place in the industry with a pretty doppelgänger. Things get ugly fast.

It’s an often sharp satire that nonetheless goes wide and swings wildly even when it lands its punches. What makes the film so beautiful, though, is partly the cast. The stars bring both baggage and a back catalogue with them when they appear on screen, the shine of past roles and personal histories reflecting off them like light in a diamond. There’s a reason the lead actress is named Elizabeth Sparkle. The fact that Moore plays the older actress might initially strike you as a tongue-in-cheek commentary at best and a cruel joke at her expense at worst. The film can’t help but be a bit of the former, but it’s anything but the latter, even if you’re invited to see parallels between a fictional famous woman cast out of paradise, aka Hollywood, and a real one who gradually allowed herself to step outside the box.

So, watching Sparkle face rejection from a company that once celebrated her and then resort to extreme measures to avoid feeling irrelevant—measures that ultimately turn her literally against herself—is a compressed history of the treatment of female movie stars from the silent era to the streaming era. Plus some change. What you also see is a young soap opera star who narrowly avoids becoming a self-described victim of show business; the raven-haired beauty with the raspy voice of the suddenly ubiquitous Brat Pack; one half of a celebrity couple who is left blinking in the ensuing spotlight; the artist who helps turn a decent supernatural romance into a real hit and sells a lot of pottery spinners in the process; a star who poses naturally and pregnant on magazine covers; a famous person who was infamously dissected for her looks, alleged “diva-like” attitude and $12.5 million salary (still less than her male A-list counterparts in the mid-1990s); a former ingenue who made a comeback by appearing in a bikini at over 40 years of age; and someone who, despite the fact that she still graces the screens (see: 2019s Company animals), gives the feeling that they have gone into self-imposed exile in order to survive.

Looking back on Moore’s incredible rollercoaster ride, one must grapple with two fundamental elements of the movie business: sex and gloating. From the beginning, she was cast in roles that doubled as the “idealized woman” (the object of desire of 16-year-old photographer Jon Cryer in “The 1984 Film”). No small matter) and/or victims (the self-destructive Georgetown graduate who was narrowly saved from freezing to death in 1985 St. Elmo’s Fire). The success of Spirit gave her influence, although magazine articles mentioned her debates with director Jerry Zucker and that “she is a team player, but (there) are ideas she does not favor.” This is from a 1991 article premiere Cover story, the same one that mentions that she “radiates sex like a blonde Mata Hari” on the set of The butcher’s wife.

A few months later, Moore was on the cover of Vanity Fair, She showed off a baby bump without clothes and made instant pop culture history; the article focuses as much on her “difficulties” during production and her marriage to Bruce Willis as on the film she was promoting. The next year she shot a second VF cover, opting for a suit painted on her naked body rather than a real outfit. Meanwhile, a quote from the play’s author suggested that she “prefers to play tough, angry characters (and) doesn’t like to smile on screen.” After starring in An immoral offer, ie the film in which Robert Redford pays a million dollars to sleep with her, a writer for esquire spends two-thirds of a “Profile” story waxing poetic about offering her $500 for a kiss. It’s even worse than it sounds.

When Moore became the highest-paid actress of her time thanks to her $12.5 million salary for the 1996 film, Striptease, She was labelled as difficult. As a result, her breaking through this particular glass ceiling was seen less as a step towards gender equality and more as an example of professional overload. “I knew that whoever stepped out first would take the hit,” she said diversity this year, just before The substance “The narrative quickly became ‘Well, she’s only getting paid this amount because she’s playing a stripper.’ That hit me really hard.” When she did a 180-degree turn and played a soldier in the male world of the military in GI Jane The next year, no one talked about her salary – everyone was too busy chatting about how she suppressed her femininity and shaved her head in the most cynical way imaginable. Back to this Charlie Angels – Full Power Sequence that sparked a minor resurgence of “Demi is back!” headlines in 2003: How many articles and interviews do you think mentioned how she brought a cheesy, ironic twist to a standard villain role? And how many do you think focused primarily on how amazing her beach body was, for a woman of her age, watched?

All this is in the back of your mind when you watch The substanceAnd while it’s easy to accuse Fargeat’s film of hating both the player and the game as it chases Hollywood’s eternal fountain of youth, it’s Moore’s complicated history with Hollywood and her body – something her 2019 memoir Everything is upside down with gusto—it says so much about Sparkle’s insecurity, her fear, her hope for a second chance, and her anger at what is ultimately a betrayal. Our relationship with this woman we’ve seen on screen for decades is intentionally evoked in every scene of this body horror film, and that’s even before the VFX team starts showing you what happens when she fails to comply with the makeover program’s requirement to switch between Sparkle: Original Recipe and Sparkle: Extra-Crispy every seven days. The most disturbing sequence, however, involves neither the grotesque use of deforming prosthetics nor digital mutilation; it simply keeps the camera trained on Moore as she looks in the mirror, smearing off her face the makeup she applied in a last-ditch attempt to look attractive to a male suitor. The pain is so palpable it’s almost impossible to watch.

Still The substance feels like a victory lap for Moore because she has finally reached a point where the jibes about her being a diva, the need to dress up and deck herself out in a designer suit for some decision maker, and the endless but-is-she-hot– enough hand-wringing is behind her. She may show a lot of skin in Fargeat’s film, but not because she’s trying to seduce anyone or secure her place in the filmmaking food chain. Moore wasn’t dismissed because of her age – she’s come to terms with it. Perhaps the best performance of her career, Moore delivers this biting horror film, so vulnerable, so graphically naked, because she has renounced her membership in the showbiz club that demanded so much of her and then mocked her for giving in.

The key to understanding their actions in The substance maybe it is not those roles from the early to mid-1990s. It could be limited to another, much shorter appearance in a 2024 film. Less than a month after the premiere of Fargeat’s masterpiece in Cannes, Hulu released Brats follows filmmaker and Brat Packer colleague Andrew McCarthy as he tries to understand his involvement in this long-forgotten 1980s phenomenon. When he thinks of his St. Elmo’s Fire At her co-star’s home, which is a cross between a Zen retreat and a luxury spa, Moore greets him warmly and reminisces about all the madness. But above all, she seems remarkably at peace with herself. You immediately get the feeling that she no longer needs to make herself into a celebrity. And that feeling of knowing who she is now has undoubtedly allowed her to go into Sparkle’s dark places and let some light in.