Demi Moore was one of Hollywood’s biggest stars in the 90s. She opened the decade with a romantic and popular classic like. Ghost (1990), she became known as an actress in some good men (1992), caused by An indecent proposal (1993), Harassment (1994) or Striptease (1996) and took on an action film when only men starred in it. Lieutenant O’Neill (1997). Suddenly, in the 2000s, Demi Moore all but disappeared from fame. She continued to work, but far from the roles with which she had forged her figure in the film industry. What had happened?
There is no official answer, but in 2002 Demi Moore turned 40, the date from which an actress ceased to be “useful” in Hollywood. A generation of actresses have experienced in their bodies the pressure of the industry, which has pushed them aside for an age and who, to survive, have resorted to operations which, in addition, have become a source of gossip and news in gossip magazines.
To them, you only wanted that if you were young and healthy. And that’s why many deserved someone to save them with a role worthy of it. This happened recently with little girl, where Nicole Kidman pokes fun at these aesthetic pressures, but this was mostly done by French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat, who gave Demi Moore what we call in Hollywood a “comeback”. A return that left everyone speechless since it could be seen at the Cannes Film Festival. This return in style is called The bottomand can now be seen in cinemas.
In French competition, it was surprising because we had never seen so much blood in a film in competition, but above all because the film is revenge in the form of body horror to all these men who ruined the lives of so many women in the sector, making them feel like they were worthless because their physique was no longer that of a young girl or simply because they were getting older. Moore could have played herself, and the viewer feels that way even as she plays Elisabeth Sparkle, an actress who survives as an aerobics instructor and who, facing imminent dismissal due to her age, resorts to experimental treatment with which she recovers a younger youth. version. and pretty in herself. It causes a feast of gore and blood, but above all a hilarious and scathing critique of Hollywood.
Fargeat specifies that this story is important to her, because it is an issue that has always touched her. “I started writing the film when I was over 40 and I started having these strong, violent thoughts that my life was going to end, that no one would be interested in it anymore. I wasn’t going to be useful to anyone, no one would look at me or want to work with me. It was very violent because it seemed real. At that point, I took a step back and said: I have to do something with this, because this feeling is very violent and very overwhelming,” he explains of the beginning of The bottom.
The core of the company remains the same. Culture, industry, the economy, the pharmaceutical world… everything is hugely unbalanced and massively dominated by men.
Coralie Fargeat
— Director
When he wrote the script, he thought of symbols that represented what he wanted to tell. It was always clear that the protagonist would be an actress, because “she is the greatest symbol of having to face the external gaze and the way the words and looks of others make us feel if we are worth it.” or not.” “I started thinking about what would be the best symbol, the most iconic Hollywood actress, the one who was presented to us as a kind of model so that we would believe that if we were beautiful we would be happy and loved. This that we subconsciously have in our collective dream. A woman who was appreciated for her looks, but who had to deal with the pressure of being in the spotlight. And Demi Moore was the perfect icon,” says the director.
He defines her as an actress who “took a lot of risks with her decisions” and who “experienced a lot in her personal life”. “I think the storyline was about her. We spent a lot of time talking, because I wanted to explain to him how far the film was going to go, how extreme it was going to be, how difficult it was going to be to film it, because there were a lot of prosthetics and a lot of nudity. It was going to be a long shoot, in France and without a big budget. So I wanted her to be aware of everything that was going to entail so that she was sure she was ready to take the risk that the film required,” she admits.
Although The bottom has become one of the films of the year, Coralie Fargeat knows that it is an exception, and that there is still “not enough space, there are not enough discussions and there are no changes to anything the film is about.” “Society is not moving quickly on these issues, everything is moving very slowly. It surprises me to see that we are still practically at the same point as a long time ago, and that is why I wanted to do something violent and disruptive with the tools at my disposal, which are the cinema tools. I wanted to tell in a visceral way what I feel, how we get used to all this because deep down we have no choice. If we want to have a place in society, we still have to give in on many things,” he criticizes.
This is why he calls for a “revolution” which does not happen, because he has the feeling that “as soon as something starts, it goes away quickly”. “The core of the company remains the same. Culture, industry, the economy, the pharmaceutical world… everything is extremely unbalanced and overwhelmingly dominated by men. This is also what the film is about. I’m not subtle in the way I show things because I think society is not at all subtle about these issues. It’s still difficult to be a feminist because you receive a lot of criticism. We tell you that enough is enough, don’t go too far. Then you read the numbers of women raped, murdered and beaten by their husbands and you wonder: How could this not happen to me?
His film also responds to what he feels, with his “desire to explode like a monster and spill blood everywhere”. This is why she supports the words of Emma Thompson, who emphasized in an interview that “we have never had a violent revolution”, but rather that women took the place left to them in society, but that there is nevertheless still “a lot of fear for women to really take their place in the world and restructure all these habits that have been there for more than 2,000 years”. The bottom It’s a small revolution to expand this space in the form of a gore and feminist bomb.
