Crimes of the Future [2]
Entry updated 23 December 2024. Tagged: Film.
Film (2022). A Canadian/French/UK/Greek co-production. Serendipity Point Films, Telefilm Canada, Ingenious Media, Argonauts Productions, Crave, CBC Films, ERT, Rocket Science. Written and directed by David Cronenberg. Cast includes Welket Bungué, Don McKellar, Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, Scott Speedman and Kristen Stewart. 107 minutes. Colour.
In an unspecified future time and place, disease and physical pain have largely been eradicated. Machines and bio-Computers are used to directly interface with their human users. In this world, surgical acts are art, and the couple of Saul Tenser (Mortensen) and Caprice (Seydoux) are among its most celebrated proponents. Tenser has an affliction called "accelerated evolution syndrome", which causes organs to grow almost spontaneously in his body, which are then removed as part of their performances. It also leaves him unable to digest food, and to be one of the few people not immune to pain, relying on a strangely contrived bed and chair to alleviate his suffering. Other people go through even more bizarre developments, including an eight-year-old boy whose body digests plastics; he is killed by his mother who sees him as a Monster. The boy's father, Lang (Speedman) is part of an radical group who sees his son as the part of the next stage of Evolution, and are modifying their systems to subsist on artificial diets. He tries to enlist Tanser to their cause, not knowing that Tenser is an informant to a government that is attempting to crack down on biological modifications.
Tenser performs an autopsy on the boy as part of a performance, in which is revealed that this child's digestive system is not a natural development, but has been artificially inserted. Lang runs away distraught, and is killed by government agents. Tenser's government contact (Bungué) admits that the surgery on the child had been performed by a member of the National Organ Registry, an organisation that catalogues changes in organ evolution, in order to hide a genuine biological evolution. Tenser cuts his ties with the agency, seeming to now sympathize with the revolutionary cell. The film ends with Caprice feeding Tenser plastic, to which he appears to react with relief and ecstasy.
Cronenberg's return to the body-Horror themes with which he made his name, and which he had largely moved away from, is his first original screenplay since eXistenZ (1999). It is also one of his most elegantly perverse films. Many reviews drew attention to its autobiographical aspects, with the performance artists a stand-in for the director, and with elements drawn particularly from Videodrome (1982) and The Naked Lunch (1991) and a mise-en-scène as hermetically sealed as Crash (1995), though with an emphasis on pliable flesh rather than gleaming machinery. Indeed, almost all the hardware in the film has an organic, tactile quality, obviously at odds with any real future developments, but entirely of a piece with the mood of the film, resulting in some of Cronenberg's most imaginative designs. If it was intended as a summation of a singular career, it could hardly have worked better, aided by an outstanding cast. Unfortunately, despite critical plaudits (it was voted best film of the year by the critics of the US magazine Film Comment) it was a commercial failure, barely recouping a quarter of its budget. Apart from the title, it is unrelated to Cronenberg's earlier film of the same name: see Crimes of the Future (1970). [CWa]
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