Crimes of the Future

Lea Seydoux, Viggo Mortensen, and Kristen Stewart in Crimes of the Future

The times have finally caught up with David Cronenberg. His body horror films may have seemed outré in the 80s, but the realities of the 21st century have given his work, like that of  Marshall McLuhan and Alvin Toffler, the weight of prophecy. Body modification is so commonplace in my burg of Portland that when I see someone with devil's horns or piercings in the double digits, I nary bat an eye. Cronenberg has had such a long and successful enough career that he has spawned cinematic progeny: not only his actual son Brandon, but such acolytes as Julia Ducournau and Carlo Mirabella-Davis.

Crimes of the Future marks a return to the theme of body horror that dominated his work in the 80s and 90s. Indeed, the script dates back to the 90s. What resonated with me was the self-identification of Cronenberg with his protagonist, the performance artist Saul Tenser, played by Viggo Mortenson. Tenser and his partner, Caprice (Lea Seydoux) engage in body modification and ritualized surgeries. We are shown rival performance artists engaging in similar work. However, years of dedication to his art have taken a toll on Tenser. His health and diet are poor. He shuffles around in a magus like shroud, bemoaning his waning powers and confessing that he is jealous of younger artists. His name (which could be read as "anxious Jew") and the presence of Mortensen, the director's leading man of choice since A History of Violence, stress the identification of the aged director with his protagonist. 

Furthermore, the acolytes of his work are regarded ambivalently. Caprice and an official from the "National Organ Registry", played by Kristen Stewart, revere his body of work, but both seem to want to use his work as a springboard for their own artistic aspirations. Tenser is wary of them both. Though Caprice is his partner in life and work, Tenser keeps aspects of his self hidden from her. The scene where Caprice unzips his torso and starts licking his internal organs suggests, perhaps all too obviously, the vampiric nature of their relationship.

The film is far from flawless. The rusted ships and decayed buildings of Athens are appropriate to the fallen nature of mankind in the film, but are too reminiscent of the Interzone of Burrough's and (Cronenberg's) Naked Lunch. The paranoid and predatory mix of government officials and business representatives seems fuzzily drawn here; as it does to me in Burroughs' oeuvre (too much bug spray, perhaps). Seydoux, a fierce talent, is stuck with more expository dialogue than is good for an ESL thespian. My wife, a lifelong Cronenberg fan, found his rehash of themes to be tired. Certainly, he has explored fetishism to death.  This is always the paradox of auteurist cinema, though. Is an old director lamely recycling his old tropes or intriguingly reinvestigating lifelong obsessions. It is no surprise to me that the American critics least receptive to auteurism (Ann Hornaday, Mick LaSalle, Rex Reed) are the ones that have graced this film with its most negative reviews.

I think Crimes of the Future is middling Cronenberg (like his Naked Lunch), but my esteem for his vision and the complexity of its thematic reach make it the best new film I have seen in 2022. It contains yet another superb Howard Shore score.  Mortenson and Stewart are both excellent and the ending, too abrupt for some, ranks as one of his most fascinating. Is the ending an act of suicide or a new form of communion; or both. Neither the red pill nor blue one, but purple. The old flesh is dead. Long live the new flesh!

In Cronenberg's work, secular institutions are shown as having usurped the ritualistic trapping and communal bonding of religion. (see especially The Brood, Dead Ringers and Eastern Promises) The unease of this transition is one of Cronenberg's most important themes. In his early films, revulsion had been the primary response to the horrors of the flesh in our new secular, technological world. In Crimes of the Future, the mood is one of serene acceptance, one of the last stages of a human contemplating mortality. The techno, medical, performance art (aka sexless sex) is presented in a blasé manner. Stylistically, Cronenberg has never been a showy director in utilizing his camera. Nor is he a moralist. This is why the film seems undynamic and "boring" to some. 

Cronenberg has always been queasy about the human body and its twin signifiers, sex and death. One proclaims fertility, the other seemingly barren nothingness. One of our least romantic artists, Cronenberg displays supreme self-knowledge when Tenser intones, after an abortive and deeply unsatisfying tryst, "I was always bad at the old sex." Not an epitaph, but, hopefully, the start of a new stage.