The Ugly Stepsister: A Joyous, Cautionary, Plastic Surgery Disaster Fairy Tale
Per its definition on the festival’s website, the Panorama section of the Berlinale is “explicitly queer, explicitly feminist, explicitly political”. It follows that the Panorama is the section of the program destined to contain the greatest quantum of queer cinema and, by extension, to provide the greatest number of contenders to the independently run Teddy Award.
Norwegian writer-director Emilie Blichfeldt’s Panorama entry, the squirmsome body horror flick The Ugly Stepsister (Den stygge stesøsteren), did not appear on the Teddy Award shortlist. Nevertheless, so profound a takedown of cis-heteronormative fairy tale tropes does Blichfeldt assay in her strikingly accomplished debut feature, that The Ugly Stepsister arguably qualifies as a stealth queer text. Such is its visceral antipathy to the straight connubial Cinderella fantasy it so gleefully, gruesomely skewers!
An avowedly feminist text it certainly is, too, if taking a very different tack to a prior classic revisionist take on Cinderella celebrated for its surprising feminism, Václav Vorlíček’s Three Wishes for Cinderella (Tři oříšky pro Popelku / Drei Haselnüsse für Aschenbrödel). This 1973 Czechoslovak-East German co-production is a Yuletide viewing staple to this day in not just the Czech and German lands, but in Blichfeldt’s Norway too. She professes to being a longtime fan. Of course!
In Vorlíček’s film, Cinderella (Libuše Šafránková) gets her man, as one is primed to expect, but not before running rings around him, outfoxing him in games of derring-do and donning drag to flirt with him while besting him at manly feats. It’s a gently subversive film – and decidedly family-friendly. Unlike…
The Ugly Stepsister is concerned less with the film’s Cinderella figure, the classically beautiful (if explicitly unmaidenlike) Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Næss), and more with her resented, less comely stepsister-by-a-doomed-marriage-of-fiduciary-convenience, Elvira. As played by the wholly committed, utterly compelling Lea Myren, Elvira is a hopeless devotee of fairytale romance. Yet for all her gawky naivety, she possesses a steely determination to marry the handsome Prince Julian (Isac Calmroth), in which folly she is amply aided by her riches-seeking, newly widowed mother (Ane Dahl Torp). For the Prince is (ostensibly) the author of a book of sappy, boy-band-worthy romantic verse Elvira keeps ever close to her bosom – verse which doth surely sing to her, and render her heart all a-flutter!
Such is Elvira’s determination that not even a chance encounter in the woods with said Prince, revealing him, in fact, to be a priapic misogynist jerk keeping the company of a pair of hee-hawing, arsehole lads-in-waiting, can put her off one iota. Elvira opts to see the forest rather than the trees, and is unshaken in her delusional, childish belief that she and the Prince are destined to live happily together ever after. Nevertheless, it might still help if she could become a little prettier meanwhile, somehow…
À la Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, linking the pursuit of happiness to one’s personal pulchritude – whether “God-given” or attained, say, through desperate, antediluvian body modification measures – is a fool’s errand, and will surely end very, very poorly. And of course it ultimately does, in a (G)rim(m) and grisly manner indeed, to which Tod Browning circa Freaks would surely cluck his hearty approval!
But the joys of The Ugly Stepsister are far from being all about the destination – for oh what larks there are to be had en route! There’s Elvira’s constant dressings-down in a sinister finishing school to savour (and here there is, perhaps, a soupçon of campy queerness in some of the characterisations, not least with the sadistic instructrix, Madam Vanja (Katarzyna Herman), who bears some resemblance to Alida Valli’s Miss Tanner in Dario Argento’s Suspiria. On which note, some of Vilde Tuv and Kaada’s score smacks agreeably of Goblin too.)
And oh what fun there is to be had as Elvira’s mania increases with each passing mediaeval cosmetic procedure and each lengthy recovery period, rendering her decidedly unbecoming meanwhile. Internal transformations are occurring, too; Elvira develops a voracious appetite after consuming a tapeworm given her by a well-meaning(?) mentor, and the sounds of gastric distress so produced – an ominous intermittent rumbling – can surely only harbinge ill tidings! The rot truly sets in; her hair starts coming out in clumps, and the longer one watches, the more one can’t help but fear a scene of almighty, possibly scatological, abjection cannot be far away – but surely not before the Prince’s ball, at which, per the fairy tale script, he’ll select his bride, providing the perfect arena for maximal public humiliation, no…?
So remember, kids – if you’re ever at a party, and someone offers you a tapeworm egg: just say no.
On which note: hooray for old school practical effects! All the better to gross you out, my pretties. And for the decidedly Easten European sensibility that permeates The Ugly Stepsister, which is surely an honorary great nibling of Slovak fantasy-horror great Juraj Herz’s late ‘70s Beauty and the Beast (Panna a netvor), which likewise breathed ghoulish new life into a timeworn fairy tale by suffusing its essence with a poetic, alchemical admixture of luminous beauty and dank fetor.
One’s also reminded of Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (Les Yeux sans visage) – the salutary lesson common to both being that it’s best to keep any cosmetic procedures one might entertain the idea of undertaking at a few removes, at the very least, from over-invested parents. Moreover, the influence of Takashi Miike’s unforgettable proto-torture porn opus, Audition (Ōdishon) can be seen and felt as well, in The Ugly Stepsister’s excruciating close-ups of surgical work being performed oh so close to the very organs with which we are principally wont to appreciate and privilege beauty – on screen, as in life and in fairy tales – the eyes. Ouch!
Cerise Howard
©FIPRESCI