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The magical granting of a wish, suddenly bestowing untold riches or fulfilling a transformative dream, is the marker of a traditional fairytale. It is a plot twist woven through folklore and one that often leads to the punishment of the greedy or the ambitious.
But although the idea is as old as Jack and his Beanstalk, the Oscar nominations unveiled last week make it clear it is also at the heart of the latest risk-taking cinema.
Among the films recognised by the Academy for their showmanship were three pieces of surreal, contemporary myth-making, each a modern morality fable. These are Anora, The Substance, and Emilia Pérez, and they are stories about just the sort of personal transformations that propel the tales of Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm. They would make an extraordinary fantasy triple bill, although none of them are films you would want a child to watch.
“Something bold and fresh has come into the Oscars lineup,” said film producer and critic Jason Solomons. “These may be new films, told in a way that looks very out of the ordinary, but they are based on some enduring myths. They take big, bold risks, yet they are anchored in classic storytelling, whether from the Brothers Grimm or Aesop. They are about rebirth and transformation and these are ideas that have lasted for a good reason.”
In Anora, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes last spring for its American film-maker Sean Baker, a Brooklyn lapdancer is swept away from poverty by a rich Russian client. Caught up by a whirl of apparent romance, this feisty Cinderella briefly gets to waltz with her prince.
And in The Substance, Demi Moore, like Snow White’s wicked stepmother, is driven to extreme measures to regain her beauty. The director, Coralie Fargeat, casts her as a famous fitness guru whose star has waned in middle age, leading her to make a fateful deal to restore her youth.
Finally, Emilia Pérez is about a complete physical transformation. A Mexican drug cartel leader, the Frog Prince in this film from French director Jacques Audiard, turns overnight into someone entirely different and starts to atone for an evil past.
Solomons, who is making his own “dangerous and delicious” film, an adaptation of Edward Chisholm’s A Waiter in Paris, suggests that the increased appetite for such outlandish fare, with screenplays that go “through the looking glass”, shows a turn in the tide. The old studio habit of sticking to proven entertainment formulas is looking more outdated than ever, he suggests. “We have now got to find stories that ask: “If I could change my whole life, what would it really look like? What would the fallout be?”
The three nominated tales meet this challenge, giving lurid, often pantomime levels of hyper-reality. Yet they are grounded in gritty and alarming human detail. “The women at the centre of these films are really punished,” said Observer film critic Wendy Ide, “but then that is often the case in a fairy story too. The heroine of The Substance is particularly badly punished, although she is not to blame, except in the sense of the internalised misogyny that Fargeat wants to show us.”
In fact, a grand total of 10 titles will be competing for Best Picture. The list includes one much more obvious fairytale, Wicked, a screen adaption of the witchy stage musical, as well as several titles that tell more conventional cinematic stories, such as the Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown.
On the shorter lineup of Best Director nominees, Baker, Fargeat and Audiard take three of five spots.
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“What’s interesting about their films is that all three use established genres to tell their stories,” said film critic, Jonathan Romney, pointing out that Emilia Pérez, which has a record-breaking 13 Oscar nominations, adopts an especially unlikely form to explore the world of a drug overlord. “It is all set up as if to show you what you would usually see in a violent TV drama about Mexico, but then it does it all as a stagey kind of musical. It is quite brash and so doesn’t relate that much to reality.”
Audiences taking the grotesque trip offered by The Substance have been even more shocked, reportedly finding it hard to watch on a full stomach. Its disturbing colour palette and buckets of gore express its deep anger at the pressure women feel under to retain their youth. “It fits into the body horror genre,” said Romney. “It is a vision of our society, but not a very real one. Cartoonish at times, it makes its point obvious from the very beginning and, rather like Emilia Pérez, it squeezes all its imaginative energy into a limited genre.”
Romney’s favourite of the trio is Anora. Described by some as a bleak version of Pretty Woman, it has its true roots in the cautionary, rag-to-riches tradition. “For me. Anora is the stronger film because it is a tragi-comedy set in the real world. Parts of it have the energy of a 1940s screwball comedy but it lets rip in a way that American comedy doesn’t often do.”
Baker understands the tough community he is portraying, Romney argues. “This means his film actually breathes. He is a movie buff and so there’s an element of farce, but it never seems unreal – unlike Wicked, of course, which is the real fairytale in the mix this year, and which is artificial to the tips of its green fingers.”
The three tales vying with Wicked for an Oscar each pivot on a moment of emotional reckoning. For the lapdancer in Anora it is the grim realisation that her escape is not real. For the woman in The Substance, it comes when her body suddenly rebels, with Moore’s gnarled appendages harking back to the witches of European storytelling as reimagined later by Disney. “Although it’s extreme, in many ways I think The Substance is the best menopause film I have seen,” says Ide.
The message of Emilia Pérez is more confused, which may be why some critics initially pushed back at its waywardness and are now so surprised by its glut of nominations. Its key moment of honesty arrives in a song sung by a chorus of bereaved Mexicans who are all hoping to reclaim the body of a lost relative. At first, a few plaintive voices are heard, but then the spotlit faces multiply across a dark screen, underlining the scale of the death toll of the drug wars. Perhaps this film deals more with hidden guilt than with the gender identity themes it also raises.
“Cinema should divide people,” said Solomons. “You have got to be bold and daring now, otherwise what’s the point? You should push people out of their comfort zone and get talked about. An audience needs to wonder what on earth a film-maker is doing.
“With Emilia Pérez, you think, hang on Audiard, you’re not Mexican and you don’t make musicals, but you are doing this now? It is daring and without a doubt it is getting through to people, whatever you finally think of it. That’s the only way now to get people up off their sofa and away from the television. ”
