Think of three girls standing in a row. The first is an ungainly teenager with braces and tightly- coiled ringlets reminiscent of pirouette cookies. The second girl, wispy-lashed and button-nosed, wears a ruffly verdant green gown and blonde wig. The third girl has chipped teeth, a bloodied face, severed toes, and a balding scalp. A tapeworm leaps from her mouth.
All three images are Elvira at different timestamps in The Ugly Stepsister (Den Stygge Stesøseren), which was Oscar-nominated this year for makeup and hairstyling. Elvira’s story is familiar: she’s Cinderella’s spurned, malicious stepsister whose story has long been eclipsed by the virtuous orphan’s. But the Norwegian film reconsiders Elvira and seems intent on startling its audience.
Elvira meets Agnes, this rendition’s Cinderella, when their parents marry. Shortly thereafter, Agnes’s father dies. But rather than the mean-spirited infiltrator, this Elvira is the outcast, head-hanging and taciturn. “Look in the mirror, sweetheart,” her own mother tells her, checking her impossible rosy-hued reveries of marrying the poet-prince. Meanwhile, Agnes’ grief turns her into an aggressor and direct competitor, despite her illicit romance with a stable hand that results in her stepmother’s punitive treatment. But Elvira will do anything to marry the prince.
Writer-Director Emilie Blichfeldt sets her tale in the late nineteenth century, when rhinoplasty began to emerge. Its practitioners were the newest crop of sculptors: sculptors of bone. The film’s soundtrack is synthy and its style a Gothic fever-dream. What begins with a prescient nose job—Elvira selects her nose from a catalogue and wears a muzzle-like garment afterwards—escalates into a series of alarming bodily modifications that turn The Ugly Stepsister from fairytale to body horror. Eyelashes needle-and-threaded through the eyelid, a growing tapeworm begging hungry through the stomach, binge-eating sprees that feed a ravenous Elvira and the parasite inside of her, the slaughtering of a foot.
More body horror abounds in All Flesh by Ananda Devi, translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman and forthcoming with Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in April. Instead of trying to conform, the protagonist edges towards a different extremity, becoming morbidly obese. Airlines refuse her; schoolchildren taunt her; men snub her. One day, the protagonist gets stuck in a doorframe. Her father calls men to rescue her, among them a carpenter who seems to see her differently. The two begin a romance that introduces the protagonist to firsts and indulgences. One day, he begins to take photographs of her. Then, they go viral on the internet.
Though told in first-person, the narration feels distant and extra-corporeal, glimmering in its deranged, alliterative poetics: “Meals were the metronome of my decline”; “I wavered between devastation and devourment”; “I offer myself up at last to the silence of the body.” The protagonist is a “pink elephant.” The lyricism, grandiose allusions, and minimal material specificity at times imbue the story with a faraway dreaminess.
Elvira and the protagonist of All Flesh both binge, feeding an other that lives within her. Elvira feeds a tapeworm whose egg she swallowed to slim herself down. The All Flesh protagonist eats for her twin, feeding a delusion her father has believed since her birth: that she gobbled up a twin in the womb and is two people. Each character, too, experiences a moment of transcendence—the protagonist of All Flesh in her tastes of pleasure with the carpenter, and Elvira in her short-lived victory of one-upmanship.
In The Ugly Stepsister, a troupe of dancers in finishing school is chosen to perform at the prince’s ball. With Cinderella’s exit, Elvira inches her way to the starriest spot, and at the ball, she is front and center, clad in green leggings and a flower headpiece like a modernist ballerina. Here, everything about her is different and improved. The prince even condescends to dance with her.
But a facade is wont to tarnish, and both stories’ sad endings feel inevitable from the start: these are stories we already know. The prince must abandon Elvira for Cinderella. The love story of All Flesh must expire. Elvira must slice her foot to fit a slipper. The protagonist of All Flesh must livestream an act of self-destruction online. Both come undone.
The Ugly Stepsister and All Flesh feel distant and dystopian yet become strikingly immediate in our age of omnipresent weight loss ads. The two pieces are brought together for their inquiries into the female body; how it can be modified and carried towards extremity; and how those we trust most—parental figures, particularly—can enable and destabilize. Conform or don’t conform: there seems to be no deliverance for the woman who doesn’t fit. Blichfeldt’s ugly stepsister. Devi’s “pink elephant.” She must be vilified.