Among the 22 main competition works at this year's Cannes Film Festival, four female directors have outlined the survival blueprints of marginalized women with their respective lenses. They avoid grand narratives and focus on the objectified bodies in the entertainment industry, the emotional wrinkles of women at the bottom of Indian society, the plight of orphaned children in the British wilderness, and the youth alienated by traffic in the era of social networks. These works, either violent or gentle, jointly weave a spiritual fable of women between gazing and counter-gazing.

The Substance: Disassembling the "Economics of Gaze" in a Bloodbath

Coralie Fargeat's The Substance is the epicenter of controversy at this festival. This French director, who once showcased the "weak woman's counter-kill" in Revenge, this time injects a caustic satire of the entertainment industry into the body horror genre. Through the setting of "injecting a drug to split into a younger self", the film blends classic Hollywood narratives (the anxiety of actress replacement in Sunset Boulevard and All About Eve) with consumerist symbols of the millennium (the Pump It Up fitness culture and the USB drive medium), constructing a cruel carnival about "beauty".

Fargeat's visual language is full of a nostalgic feeling of cult films: the industrial art of The Thing, the stage violence of Carrie, and the manic editing of Requiem for a Dream jointly pile up a visual spectacle of the disintegration of the body. She attempts to reverse the "male gaze" in an extreme way — when a male character jokes about "the organs being in the right place", the camera makes the breasts fall from the eye sockets and the teeth crack in a pool of blood, transforming the objectified body into a nightmare for the gazer. However, the hour-long nude and voyeuristic shots in the first half make the stance of "counter-gaze" ambiguous: when compliance and rebellion are evenly matched in terms of spatial and temporal quality, the effectiveness of the satire is inevitably diluted.

The weakness of the script further fuels the controversy: the split "dual heroines" have been reduced to stereotypical competition symbols, missing the opportunity to explore same-sex symbiosis and identity philosophy. In the end, when the protagonist is still obsessed with the dream of "beauty" amidst the physical decay, the film remains at a pessimistic accusation of consumerism and fails to reach a deeper sense of female community. Although it won the Best Screenplay Award, its tearing deconstruction of gender power is still like the "substance" injected into the blood vessel in the film, carrying unhealable cracks in its violence.

A Light Never Seen: The Philosophy of Dew in the Night of Mumbai

Payal Kapadia's A Light Never Seen is like a drop of midnight dew, reflecting the emotional spectrum of three generations of Indian women. This director, who once recorded the campus protest in the documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing, continues her gentle gaze on marginalized groups in her first fictional work: in a Mumbai hospital, the forbidden love of a young nurse, the marital dilemma of a middle-aged woman, and the lonely watch of an elderly widow are interwoven into a poem in the blues-like images.

The film constructs an intimate narrative with diaries, text messages, and ambient sounds, and the train serves as the core image throughout — it is both a symbol of escape and a metaphor for the flow of life. Kapadia abandons the spectacular depiction of India and immerses the camera in daily life: the damp alleys, the hospital corridors, and the string lights by the seaside allow gender issues to dissolve naturally in the breaths and whispers of the characters. Here, the female body does not need to be a symbol of resistance but a container for emotions: the young girl struggles in lust, the middle-aged woman is suffocated by responsibility, and the elderly woman is speechless in memory. Their vulnerability and tenacity are given equal respect under the director's lens.

However, the overly poetic narrative also triggers self-reflection: when social realities (arranged marriages, class barriers) are softened in poetry, does it avoid deeper inquiries? But perhaps this "not inquiring" is precisely a gentle resistance — in the male-dominated film industry, the very state of women's existence is already a poem worthy of being gazed upon. When the three heroines embrace by the seaside, the string lights above their heads are more powerful than all grand political declarations: the emotions that grow in the cracks are precisely the most tenacious light.

The Beast: The Wingless Guardian in the Wilderness

Andrea Arnold's The Beast continues her signature rough realism but embeds a "fantastical bird" in it. This British director, who once laid bare the pain of youth in Fish Tank, this time turns her camera on teenagers under the shadow of domestic violence: a young girl confronts her father to protect her younger siblings, and the mysterious "bird" wanders in the wilderness like a knight-errant, becoming a spiritual totem for marginalized children.

Arnold's camera is still cruel: the handheld photography captures the chaos of the low-rent housing, and the natural light outlines the bruises and tears on the characters' faces. But the addition of the "bird" gives the film an extra layer of fairy-tale-like tenderness — this genderless guardian is not only a deconstruction of the traditional patriarchal family (the father is named "Bug" and will eventually be pecked at by the "bird"), but also a metaphor for the mutual assistance and symbiosis of marginalized groups. When the young girl finally has the "eyes of the bird", it means that she has grown from a protected person to a protector, completing Arnold's life fable of "dancing in the mire".

However, the integration of the fantastical elements and realism is somewhat abrupt: the "bird" clad in rough images appears clumsy in the fairy-tale texture, as if a compromise of realism to romanticism. But this imperfection is precisely its charm — when social issues (domestic violence, teenage parenthood) flood in like a tide, Arnold chooses to make "believing in fairy tales" a weapon against reality. Just like the children running in the wilderness in the film, the "bird" behind them may not be beautiful enough, but it is warm enough.

Wild Diamond: The Gilded Cage in the Era of Traffic

Agathe Riedinger's Wild Diamond focuses on the dilemma of young girls under the internet celebrity economy. As her first feature film, it continues the dreamy visuals of an MV: under the cheap neon lights, a 19-year-old girl desperately "performs herself" to get into a reality show, sexualizes her body in front of the camera, but guards her virginity in reality, trying to separate the "gazed self" from the "true self".

The film has a keen grasp of the "visual capitalism" in the era of social media: the perfect makeup under the filter, the artificial smile during the live broadcast, and the script routines of the reality show constitute a survival war about "visibility". Riedinger tries to understand the choices of young girls at the bottom — when being an internet celebrity becomes a "lottery ticket" to change their fate, even though they know it is illusory, they are still willing to jump into this gamble. However, the film stays at a superficial scan of the phenomenon, failing to deeply explore "why the sick industry has become the only way out" and also not touching on the systematic alienation of female values by the traffic economy. Those colorful visual symbols ultimately become a gentle caress of consumerism rather than a powerful interrogation.

The Polyphony of Gaze: When the Female Lens Focuses on the "Other"

The works of the four directors are like four prisms, refracting the diverse possibilities of female creation: Fargeat deconstructs the gaze with violence, Kapadia reconstructs daily life with poetry, Arnold builds a bridge between reality and fantasy, and Riedinger tries to capture the traffic anxiety of Generation Z. Their lenses may not be perfect, but they jointly break the stereotype that "female films must be gentle" — some are like daggers, some are like dewdrops, some are like the chirping of birds in the wilderness, and some are like sighs under the neon lights.

In this male-dominated film festival arena, their very existence is already a silent protest: when the marginalized women on the silver screen are no longer spectacled others but the "this one" with complex textures, when the camera no longer avoids pain but also does not indulge in suffering, and when both anger and tenderness are allowed — perhaps, this is the most touching "certain substance" at the film festival: it may not be able to reshape the rules, but it plants different possibilities of gazing in the cracks. Just as the train in A Light Never Seen heads towards the dawn, these works also light up a string of dewdrops that will not evaporate in the night sky of cinema for female narratives.