
Crimes of the Future. (18.)
Directed by David Cronenberg.
Starring Viggo Mortensen, Lea Seydoux, Kristen Stewart, Scott Speedman, Welket Bungue and Don McKellar. 107 mins.
The crimes are future but the perpetrator is historical. Cronenberg will be 80 next birthday and has given this the same title as his first full(ish) length feature. The first Crimes of the Future was filmed during summer recess at Toronto university and concerned itself with demented dermatologists and plague-spreading cosmetics; the second with insurrectional evolution.
It’s a vision of the future as a deserted, out-of-season coastal village. Cronenberg has always liked to keep his sets are uncluttered, with as few people as possible and here the few figures he’s allowed in wander around decaying Mediterranean architecture. Advanced evolution has eliminated pain and infection, while many people have started to grow new organs. One such person is Saul Tensor (Mortensen), a celebrated performance artist who has them extracted on stage before audiences by his partner Caprice (Seydoux.) Various government groups – New Vice, the National Organ Registry – are trying to keep track and crack down on this behaviour. Considering there seems to be almost nobody around you’d have thought they’d be easy to find.
After two decades of comparative respectability, during which son Brandon took over the family business, this is Cronenberg’s return to the body horror projects that made his name, full of organic mechanism, tactile software and sensual invasive surgery. It’s a bit like a remastered greatest hits compendium, fresh takes and new tweaks on images you loved (or were repelled by) from Shivers, Videodrome, eXistenz, etc. Mortensen’s cloaked, stooped figure is like Jeff Goldblum’s Brundlefly, but bobbing along on an even keel rather than heading into terminal decline.
Overall, it’s closest perhaps to his film version of Naked Lunch, full of dry dark Burroughian humour and seedy, disreputable physicians. The oppressive atmosphere acts to disguise and sharpen its basic levity. The characters all have great names: Whippet, Lang Dotrice, Dani Router. You can’t forget that the main character is called Saul Tensor because everybody he meets delights in saying his name. The only new aspect to the formula is a touch of eco-activism – Spoiler, one insurrectionist group have mutated so that can eat toxic waste.
One of the crimes of the future seems to have been a prohibition of traditional narrative structure. Even at his most commercial, Cronenberg's films moved at a stately pace, but after around 20 minutes your inner narrative clock, that instinct that tells roughly how far into the story you are, will be completely thrown. There’s tension, menace, subterfuge and danger but in an anesthetised state: like the organs in the performance art they have been extracted from the main body and put to one side in display cases. The film drifts along and then stops just as it looks to be reaching a climax.
As a fan, I loved being under the thrall of these images, the same again but a little bit different, but have to concede that if you’re not predisposed this might all seem like indulgent arthouse toss. It’s been eight years since his previous film, Maps To The Stars, and given how hard he finds it to get funding mightn’t it have been wiser to explore the dramatic possibilities just a bit more, make his magic accessible to a wider audience?
Directed by David Cronenberg.
Starring Viggo Mortensen, Lea Seydoux, Kristen Stewart, Scott Speedman, Welket Bungue and Don McKellar. 107 mins.
The crimes are future but the perpetrator is historical. Cronenberg will be 80 next birthday and has given this the same title as his first full(ish) length feature. The first Crimes of the Future was filmed during summer recess at Toronto university and concerned itself with demented dermatologists and plague-spreading cosmetics; the second with insurrectional evolution.
It’s a vision of the future as a deserted, out-of-season coastal village. Cronenberg has always liked to keep his sets are uncluttered, with as few people as possible and here the few figures he’s allowed in wander around decaying Mediterranean architecture. Advanced evolution has eliminated pain and infection, while many people have started to grow new organs. One such person is Saul Tensor (Mortensen), a celebrated performance artist who has them extracted on stage before audiences by his partner Caprice (Seydoux.) Various government groups – New Vice, the National Organ Registry – are trying to keep track and crack down on this behaviour. Considering there seems to be almost nobody around you’d have thought they’d be easy to find.
After two decades of comparative respectability, during which son Brandon took over the family business, this is Cronenberg’s return to the body horror projects that made his name, full of organic mechanism, tactile software and sensual invasive surgery. It’s a bit like a remastered greatest hits compendium, fresh takes and new tweaks on images you loved (or were repelled by) from Shivers, Videodrome, eXistenz, etc. Mortensen’s cloaked, stooped figure is like Jeff Goldblum’s Brundlefly, but bobbing along on an even keel rather than heading into terminal decline.
Overall, it’s closest perhaps to his film version of Naked Lunch, full of dry dark Burroughian humour and seedy, disreputable physicians. The oppressive atmosphere acts to disguise and sharpen its basic levity. The characters all have great names: Whippet, Lang Dotrice, Dani Router. You can’t forget that the main character is called Saul Tensor because everybody he meets delights in saying his name. The only new aspect to the formula is a touch of eco-activism – Spoiler, one insurrectionist group have mutated so that can eat toxic waste.
One of the crimes of the future seems to have been a prohibition of traditional narrative structure. Even at his most commercial, Cronenberg's films moved at a stately pace, but after around 20 minutes your inner narrative clock, that instinct that tells roughly how far into the story you are, will be completely thrown. There’s tension, menace, subterfuge and danger but in an anesthetised state: like the organs in the performance art they have been extracted from the main body and put to one side in display cases. The film drifts along and then stops just as it looks to be reaching a climax.
As a fan, I loved being under the thrall of these images, the same again but a little bit different, but have to concede that if you’re not predisposed this might all seem like indulgent arthouse toss. It’s been eight years since his previous film, Maps To The Stars, and given how hard he finds it to get funding mightn’t it have been wiser to explore the dramatic possibilities just a bit more, make his magic accessible to a wider audience?