14. Crimes of the Future, dir. David Cronenberg
I left Crimes of the Future with a loud, booming thought in my head: "THAT'S IT?" Thoughts like "wait, it's over?" or "what was the point of that?" are not the kinds of ringing endorsement that make a movie in my Top 15. Thinking for too long is a wasteful use of time these days. Who has the room in their lives for delayed satisfaction? We need to be accomplishing grand feats of consumption and creation every five minutes, after all. I demand my movies shower me with meaning and enlightenment no later than 9 PM sharp. But sometimes a movie just lingers. You never quite stop thinking about it. The lack of solid lines of closure is a quality in of itself.
Crimes of the Future is the first new David Cronenberg movie in nearly a decade. He is not going easy on his audiences in his old age. His latest work has all the makings of a traditional SciFi noir plot. It opens on a shocking act of murder. The film is full of shady men in coats whispering of conspiracies. There's an imaginative future set in a trash pile coastal city where humans have evolved some form of immunity to pain and infection. All of society is one endless piece of grotesque body horror performance art. It seems several forces are fighting for control of the direction of our species.
But then almost none of it matters in Crimes of the Future. All the conspiracy trappings do not really go anywhere. There's no final climax, no real villain, and there are not nearly as many crimes as the title promises. You have dozens of characters to keep track of, yet that is rarely worth the trouble because most of them do not really need to be here. After a horrifying opening of infanticide, the awful transgression everybody is so worried over is just an issue of diet. So again, I have to ask: that's it?
Yeah, maybe that is it. Maybe a movie can just be a weird hang with horny oddballs.
Kristen Stewart is doing something really interesting with her character Timlin, a government bureaucrat tasked with logging the many new organs that people are generating. She plays her character with this almost-cartoony nerd-girl affectation. It's a great performance, but Timlin is mostly irrelevant. I do not remember what role she actually played in the end. But nobody would dare cut her from the movie. Crimes of the Future is less a story and more the backstory for all the lore you'd need to run a tabletop RPG campaign with all these ideas. Why not have a sexually constipated secretary drool over our hero's mutations?
Cronenberg is well-known for his fetishes and imagery, which Crimes of the Future does supply: nobody else has made a movie featuring a writhing bone chair that somehow helps you digest breakfast, or a dancing man covered in ears. While his vibes are best-remembered for their use in horror films (The Fly, Videodrome, etc.), he also just has a lot on his mind beyond simply grossing the squares out. His most recent movies were Cosmopolis and Maps to the Stars, two works of social satire that were in no way horror, just musings on the unnatural state of late-capitalism. Here in Crimes of the Future, we spend our time in a dark Riviera landscape reeking of humidity and garbage. It seems like an awful dead-end for our kind, yet it may also be a kind of paradise. Our heroes, Caprice (Lea Seydoux) and Saul (Viggo Mortensen) can be in love in a non-sexual way, performing their art their way. The freaks have won.
Crimes of the Future is also an effective metaphor for the act of artistic creation. Our "hero" (in scare quotes because I cannot remember what he does that's actually heroic in a traditional sense), Saul, is beset by these tumor-like organs growing all through his body. He uses these mutations as his performance art, as Caprice surgically removes them before various onlookers. Saul is a respected master of his craft, whose painful secretions are both a blessing and a curse. He must find a way to process the growths in his soul, and why not have them be art? And I know this feeling, I've written stories that certainly feel like getting painful lumps removed from my soul. Peter Strickland's equally strange film Flux Gourmet imagined art as flatulence, I believe tumors are the more accurate metaphor. Passing gas is easy, art is not just a by-product. No, it's cutting yourself to pieces and hoping your audience likes what they see.
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