It was among the most anticipated films of Cannes “Crimes of the Future”, a testament, apparently, of the seventy-nine year old cult David Cronenberg eight years after his last “Maps of the Stars”. In the key of funeral science fiction, both philosophical and extreme (as already in his “Stereo” and “eXistenZ”) the Canadian master reflects on artistic creation and old age.
The unstoppable degradation of the environment forces the human species to physical mutations controlled by a national registry of organs. The avant-garde art of Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen, who returns alongside the author for the fourth time) consists in the extraction and exposure of his own tattooed tumors, in constant proliferation. Surgery is the moment of performance, the extraction of poetry – the ‘inner beauty’ – from the degraded bodies that the future holds. It is the development of a theme addressed, with the same title, in Cronenberg’s second film, 1970. The focus in that case was limited to the atrocities of the cosmetics industry.
The human body has always been the director’s ‘magnificent obsession’, the only seat of spirituality: ‘Body is Reality’, is the writing that passes on the screen while his assistant Caprice (Léa Seidoux) maneuvers the remote-controlled scalpels. We have built a world that destroys us: how will we adapt to survival? Saul Tenser makes his diseases a matter of creation. He is the pioneer of Organography and the commercial and worldly exploitation of the creations of a devastated body, dependent on beds and chairs that reproduce skeletal and intestinal sections, is the macabre landing of body art. In metaphor, the allusion to Hollywood’s exploitation of independent film by Hollywood is more than transparent.
The fantastic proliferation of new tumors, the visible cuts to deface the faces and the dancers with multiple grafts of human ears (accompanied by string quartets) are the pinnacle of chic entertainment. But clandestine societies are plotting to accelerate universal dehumanizing change: the new man will have to feed on industrial waste. To promote this horizon, the gang leader offers the corpse of his son to be quartered: an exceptional show.
It is somehow a sum of Cronenberg’s cinema, with the tools of sci-fi that for the director “allow us to dig deep into things, to study the human condition”. “I’m not good with the old sex,” Saul-Viggo shields himself to cut back on the approaches of bureaucrat Kristen Stewart. Sharp surgery blades are the new pleasure. The repertoire of horrific instruments of obscure use makes the memory of “Inseparables” pale with its sadistic collection of tools.
It is not a film for all palates. From the very first minutes, a shocking sequence about a deviant child suppressed by his mother can be quite disturbing. But the alarm, in its hallucinated gloom, works: we are manipulating the universe, expect the worst. Nocturnal, degraded and oppressive in its Hellenic locations, this creature of the old Cronenberg is certainly morbid. But I would challenge many less advanced authors to imagine an equally complex and coherent universe.