By PAYTON McCARTY-SIMAS
A middle-aged pro bodybuilder finds herself investigating the depths–and limits–of her own body in Grazia Tricarico’s debut feature BODY ODYSSEY. During the lead up to her first over-50 bodybuilding competition, Mona (professional bodybuilder Jay Fuchs), is pushed out of her comfort zone by those around her, encountering her humanity anew in the process of denying it through a superhuman regime of steroids, starvation, abstinence and grueling physical training. As her much-cherished ascetic athlete’s “mindset” begins to crack, her life grows progressively stranger, devolving into bouts of rage, obsession and, possibly, quasi-supernatural divinity. The film, developed over the course of about a decade, also boasts one of the final performances by Julian Sands (Gothic, Warlock, Boxing Helena) before his unexpected passing in 2023. To mark the American streaming debut of this poetic and surreal body horror film (available on VOD in the US February 28th), Tricarico sat down with RUE MORGUE to talk femininity, consumerism and personal freedom.
How did you find yourself involved in the world of bodybuilding?
To begin with, I did a short movie when I was in school called Mona Blonde (2014) with the same actress (Jay Fuchs). The inspiration at that time came from a meeting I had in a gym in which I prepared a fight scene with actors as an exercise from school. The owner was a bodybuilder, and so was his wife. I saw, for the first time, this special femininity and this body that is incredible, and I started to think about the possibility of using the body as a place of freedom and experimentation of beauty.
But I also found another level, that is when the body becomes a prison and it happens every day to everybody, because we have this conflict with our aspect. Society imposes a specific standard of beauty onto us. And I think that the topic of the body is important for us, especially today. We can think about our digital identity, for example. Probably in the future, the human species will be free from this container and resolve this conflict.
On that note, I was struck by the way that gender works in BODY ODYSSEY, meaning the conflict Mona has between what she wants to do with her body and how people perceive it as incorrectly feminine or as “not feminine” at all. In the film, several people perceive her as a man and respond transphobically. I’d love to hear about that dysphoric element.
When I started to have contact with this world–and as you can see, I’m not an athletic person (laughs)–but I have had a working relationship with Jay for many years. And working with her is an experience in the sense that you can see the looks people give her. Some look at her with disgust, as if she had removed the difference between male and female. It’s different for children, and this is interesting, because children look at her like something that comes from a magic world, without the prejudice, without this structure that we have with respect to beauty. But what I understand with her, is this relation between this outside conflict and the pure love and the power that she has every time she looks at herself in the mirror. And she loves her image outside the opinion the world has about her body. And exactly in this point, I found the beauty and the mood the real idea of the movie. I had never seen a woman look at herself like this.
That’s beautiful.
Yeah, I think so.
BODY ODYSSEY feels so familiar with this world. Did Jay have a lot of input in the script? Did you and your co-screenwriters (Marco Morana and Guilio Rizzo) work with her to give that feeling of familiarity? Or had you just spent enough time with her that you felt comfortable writing these characters in this context?
The movie is totally fiction and it’s surreal, but for sure she had a great connection with the script. We never talked about the script during our years of friendship. It was really touching the day I told her story of the movie, because it’s not about Jay’s life, but she recognized in every single moment an emotion and a moment in her life. She was immediately involved in the movie and in the cinema machine. She was epic during the process–really, really epic. She’s a special person.
She’s really magnetic. In terms of that subjectivity and the surrealism of the movie, I’m really interested in the mythology, and I’d love to hear more about it. There’s this motif of water that seems to be part of how you access Mona’s femininity. Could you tell me more?
The myth is even in the title: The Odyssey. It’s in the way she tries to get her body to voluntarily come back to her, to be connected with herself until the end. But it’s a movie that’s also about a separation. This idea of beauty that’s in bodybuilding comes from the Hellenic world. If we think about godliness, for example, or Hercules, we tried to put this idea of beauty in the movie. The Temple Gym–where Mona trains–for example, it’s an old palace, because the body is a temple, and this is the mindset of a bodybuilder.
But in a sense, the whole construction of the movie comes from the Hellenic world in different ways. For example, the character of Kurt (Julian Sands) is a kind of Pygmalion that creates a sculpture and falls in love with her. And in every scene, there’s transformation–of the body, of the location, of the situation–because we tried to create a perceptive movie that moves something in the chemical way in your body. It’s all in this idea of metamorphosis that comes from the mind.
And so, the water is a metaphor for that process?
Water is 70% of our body. In a movie in which the body is one of the main characters, I naturally connect (Mona) to the element of water. It’s an element that is continuously transforming into different states. Every single location in the movie gives an idea of her body on the inside, too. When we’re at the gynecologist, we’re in her uterus. At the dentist, we have a kind of penetration of her (with a sex scene). The cinematic language was in the visual part, but also even in the sound part, it’s all about the inside of her body. It’s a kind of dialogue, and the water is the deepest part of her. It became organic but oneiric at the same time, and this is the place in which she has her deep emotions, that kind that you don’t want to admit to yourself.
Watching this film, I was thinking about The Substance, in terms of the transformation and the rage and the body. You specifically chose to put her in the over-50 bodybuilding category, right? And there’s contrast with her younger friend who’s pregnant. How do age and femininity work together in the film?
Jay is 53 years old this year, which is when a bodybuilder reaches the maximum age. After this moment, for biological reasons, you have to start to have another kind of work on your body. You never stop being a bodybuilder, but you can’t go over this age in the same way. So, I wanted to talk about a body that is transformed–and transforming–and what she pays for these transformations. One price is the renunciation of an emotional life–that comes out in the movie when she falls in love with a teenager. Why a teenager? Because from this moment, she is renouncing her adolescence, becoming older. Because as a bodybuilder, working on your body becomes your life, and you live in isolation. You just have a relationship with your body.
The Substance is an incredible movie. I really loved it. We have to talk about femininity and youth in the cinema. It’s a necessity. In cinema, a female actress in her 40s doesn’t have many opportunities to work. In some romantic comedies, for example, you see 30-year-old female actresses and 60-year-old actors together. So, thank you (The Substance director Coralie Fargeat) for this movie. We have to talk about this in the industry, because I think that the transformation of an idea, the evolution of a mindset, starts with the cinema and the arts.
On a related topic, I was interested in the way consumerism functioned in this movie. There’s a scene where Mona’s competitor’s picture is on the boxes of these supplements, and she turns them around to hide that image. The more surreal sequences also reminded me of advertising–perfume ads in particular–and then there’s that scene where she’s filming an ad. In relation to The Substance and the images of youth that we use in the arts, what is the role of the consumerist media image?
For the world of bodybuilding, everything is connected to the commercial arts. It’s a way to ennoble this sport in the collective imaginary. There’s a stereotype of the stupid bodybuilder that just eats eggs and takes steroids. This world is a very good thing, but it’s a world that doesn’t want to deeply understand what it means to have this kind of body, that just wants to use it. And for this reason, in the making-of commercial scene, you can hear for the first time what the outside world thinks of her body. In her world, everybody looks at her like a goddess, but not in that moment.
There have been a couple of movies about bodybuilding recently: your film, Love Lies Bleeding, and Magazine Dreams. What is it about bodybuilding that speaks to this moment? And what can we learn from that?
It’s a long process that started years ago. I mean, thinking about body shaming and feminism and many things that I think as women we share. But the diversity around us caught the interest of artists all around the world, not just in the cinema. During my research about bodybuilding, I discovered very good photographers and documentaries as well. I think that when there’s a mood, an idea, something in the air … every single person has an aspect, and has a different approach to this world, but we are a collectivity, too, and we are connecting. It didn’t shock me to see other films with similar subjects.
What did your body say after you watched the movie? Did it start to talk?
Oh my goodness! I don’t know … I mean, I loved Mona. I was really rooting for her. How do you want audiences to feel as they leave? Do you want them to feel that she’s free?
In my mind, she’s free. We lost the human part, and now the sculptor is the sculpture and the human part is somewhere else. But you are free to have your reading. The spectator is the real director, in my opinion.
BODY ODYSSEY is currently streaming on MUBI.
