From The Substance to Emmanuelle: the empty promises of the ‘female gaze'

Telegraph

01-03-2025

What constitutes 'feminist' filmmaking? From Coralie Fargeat's horror-satire The Substance (in which Demi Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle, an over-the-hill superstar who dabbles in an experimental new treatment in order to regain her youth) to Halina Reijn's Babygirl (starring Nicole Kidman as a high-flying girlboss CEO who embarks on a passionate affair with her much younger intern) and Audrey Diwan's subversion of the sexploitation classic Emmanuelle, a new crop of films helmed by female directors are challenging audiences with primal explorations of female ageing, desire and insecurity.
Yet these films have proved divisive within the female audiences they seek to empower. The Substance, which has earned Moore a Best Actress Oscar nod, has been criticised for turning an ageing female body into something worthy of terror. The way the camera objectifies Moore's co-star Margaret Qualley, who plays the 'younger, more beautiful, more perfect' version of Elisabeth, with lascivious close-ups of her poreless skin and skimpy outfits, has been accused of pandering to the 'male gaze'. Of course, this is sort of the point. It's a man that tells Elisabeth about The Substance in the first place – a detail director Coralie Fargeat didn't realise herself during writing the script, but one that makes sense as the injection turns consumers into 'the version [of yourself] that men want you to look like'.
Fargeat's intentions are clear: to call out Hollywood's obsession with youth and beauty by making the audience complicit. But what exactly is achieved by replicating the means of oppression? In its grotesque finale, The Substance only punishes Elisabeth for her vanity, with hoards of onlookers laughing at her like Carrie White at her prom. There's a palpable rage at the heart of The Substance, but it's misdirected at women for taking part in vanity rituals, rather than the billion-dollar industries that push these insecurities and anxieties down our throats. Simply replicating the male gaze – a term coined by film theorist Laura Mulvey in her 1975 essay 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' to describe how male artists have depicted women for centuries – can never dismantle it.
How to tell women's stories that aren't undermined by violence against women is a recurring issue, even in critically-acclaimed films by female filmmakers. In 2021 Emerald Fennell bagged the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Promising Young Woman, in which Cassie (Carey Mulligan) takes revenge against a group of men following the rape and suicide of her best friend. While the film sees Cassie achieve her aim, it culminates in her eventual death – female empowerment always comes at the price of a woman's life.
Halina Reijn's Babygirl, starring Nicole Kidman, however, has no such issue. The film has an obvious 'female gaze' – a term coined in response to Mulvey's seminal essay – which is to say a camera that centres a woman's viewpoint, experience and desires authentically. In the decades since Mulvey's essay, the term 'female gaze' has gained popularity, spiking significantly around the release of Phoebe Waller-Bridge's Fleabag, which was praised for its abrasive, honest, unapologetic female lead.
Similarly, Babygirl centres on Romy Mathis, a high-flying, self-made CEO (Kidman) who is shown to be unsatisfied with her marriage. The film opens on her faking an orgasm during sex with her husband – the reality for many women – and then secretly masturbating to BDSM pornography. When Romy embarks on an affair with her much younger intern Samuel (Harris Dickinson) the spark between them is instant, and the subsequent sex is awkward, playful and electrifying. In a much-discussed scene, Dickinson dances shirtless to George Michael's 'Father Figure' – a cheeky nod to the film's age gap role reversal, but also an endearing demonstration of what so many filmmakers seem to forget: sex should be fun above all else.
Reijn centres Romy's pleasure and agency – yet the director herself claims she's not depicting the female gaze, but her own. Much of Babygirl comes from Reign's experiences (the notorious scene involving a glass of milk) or those of friends (Romy never orgasming with her husband). 'We're living under a patriarchy, and these are the tools that we get to play with,' she explained in an interview with Dazed Magazine. 'I love to create women characters that are not angels.'
But while Babygirl attracted plenty of buzz and box office returns, its acclaim has been substantially less than that of The Substance, with Kidman snubbed by both the Baftas and the Oscars and detractors claiming that the film wasn't 'subversive enough'. Was it because, ultimately, Kidman's character seeks pleasure through being dominated, and humiliated, by a man? At what point can we separate the female gaze from internalised misogyny?
Audrey Diwan's reimagining of Emmanuelle, the 1967 erotic novel of the same name by Emmanuelle Arsan, first adapted in 1975 and becoming one of the most influential erotic films of all time, has also been accused of not going far enough. The promise of a reimagining by Diwan – who won the Venice Film Festival's top honour in 2021 for her blistering adaptation of Annie Ernaux's memoir Happening – was exciting, but the finished film is chilly and uninspired, with more shots of Hong Kong's glittering skyscrapers than incisive sexual commentary.
It's clear that Emmanuelle (played by Noémie Merlant) enjoys sex, but all the intimate scenes within the film feel devoid of passion and intimacy. When Emmanuelle develops an infatuation with another hotel guest, it should spark a game of erotic cat and mouse; instead it feels listless and stilted. It's clear that having female filmmakers behind the camera does not inherently make a film interesting or empowering for women.
So what do we mean when we talk about 'feminist filmmaking' or 'female empowerment' in cinema? Trailblazing female filmmaker Agnès Varda argued that the very act of picking up a camera is a small revolution for a woman. 'The first feminist gesture is to say: 'Okay, they're looking at me. But I'm looking at them.' The act of deciding to look, of deciding that the world is not defined by how people see me, but how I see them,' said Agnès Varda in an interview for Marie Mandy's 2000 documentary Filming Desire: A Journey Through Women's Cinema.
Varda, a pioneer of the French New Wave, directed Cléo from 5 to 7 in 1961, in which a young singer waits for the results of a biopsy which will reveal if she has cancer. The film is entirely told from Cléo's point of view, centering her perspective as she reckons with her own mortality. Similarly, One Sings, the Other Doesn't (1977) focuses on two young women who fall in and out of touch over the course of 14 years, grappling with the subject of abortion at a time when it was illegal in France. The film was criticised by French feminists for being 'being too nuanced, not anti‐men enough', but is widely accepted now as a landmark feature.
Concurrently, Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman – whose 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles was named the greatest film of all time in Sight and Sound's decennial industry survey – pioneered a unique style of storytelling that centered women's stories through intimate depictions of domesticity. Within the three-hour Jeanne Dielman, much of the film is spent in the protagonist's kitchen, watching as she cooks and cleans. Here Akerman sought to challenge the 'hierarchy of images' within cinema that devalues domestic labour, yet she contested labels such as 'female filmmaker' being attributed to her, noting 'when people say there is a feminist film language, it is like saying there is only one way for women to express themselves'.
Across the Atlantic, Cheryl Dunye's 1996 romantic comedy The Watermelon Woman centers a young black lesbian (played by Dunye) as she attempts to create a film about little-known 1930s actress Fae Richards (an amalgam of Black actresses forgotten throughout film history.)
But perhaps the most remarkable recent reflection on the female gaze comes in Céline Sciamma's 2019 romantic drama, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, starring Noémie Merlant and Adèle Haenel as Marianne, a painter, and Héloïse, an aristocrat, who have a brief but passionate affair in 18th century France. Héloïse asks Marianne, while sitting for her portrait, 'If you look at me, who do I look at?'