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Crimes of the Future


Crimes of the Future (Cronenberg, 2022)




This review contains spoilers.

On this Canada Day in the year of our Lord 2022, I decided to do my patriotic duty and support a great Canadian filmmaker. So I hopped on the subway, headed downtown to the TIFF Bell Lightbox (a theatre that's been responsible for some of my favourite moviegoing experiences, but perhaps has lost some of its luster recently thanks to increasingly boring programming choices) and handed over my hard earned Canadian dollars for a ticket to David Cronenberg's Crimes of the Future. Now, this wasn't just patriotism at work, although there is a certain national pride I feel in enjoying the work of a great director who came out of this country whose work doesn't have that stench of distinctly Canadian lameness about it. (It might be hard to explain to non-Canadians, but imagine if 90% of the film and TV output of your country was centered on the most boring, tacky signifiers of national identity. Tune in to the CBC and just drown in an embarrassing flood of hockey, Tim Hortons, "aboot" and "eh".) But there's also the fact that like many movie fans, Cronenberg's work is near and dear to me.

Videodrome was a formative movie for me during my high school years, not just because it was a cold, weird, off putting movie that also kicked ass, but because it was a kind of metaphor for my cinephilia, putting me on a quest for the weirder horizons of cinema. (So yes, I'm going to blame my embarrassing viewing history over the last two years all on this one movie.) At the time it felt like I watched something truly transgressive. A movie with this collection of plot points shouldn't exist. Snuff TV, stomach vaginas, fleshy bulging cassettes, kinky redheaded Debbie Harry? The last one may have broken my brain. Why does the singer from Blondie have red hair? Also the whole kinky weirdo angle.

In that respect, Crimes of the Future offers up two characters in the same tradition, who I suspect would have similarly wreaked havoc on my cerebral functions had I watched this at a younger age. There's Lea Seydoux, former surgeon and partner of Viggo Mortensen, with whom she does a performance art act of cutting out his organs for an audience. And there's Kristen Stewart, as a bureaucrat in a secret government agency responsible for logging Mortensen's organs who not-so-secretly is turned on by all this. (An early scene has her visibly aroused as she inspects Mortensen's organs through a camera jammed inside his stomach.) She coins the movie's key phrase: "Surgery is the new sex." (Seydoux and Mortensen have scenes together that show this concept in fairly literal terms, which kind of grossed me out but I suspect will do a lot for somebody somewhere.) The former brings an innate warmth and emotion to an otherwise cold and alienating movie (is there another actress currently who is as good at looking on the verge of tears?), and the latter has a nervy delivery that provides some of the movie's biggest laughs.

Now, I suppose I should gesture towards the overall plot, which features Mortensen and Seydoux wowing the art world with their daring surgery-centric performance art. This is in the context of a world where human evolution is leading to the growth of weird and scary new organs and a corresponding increase in aggressive body modifications. Some of this seems to be a vehicle for Cronenberg to air out his thoughts on art, and one especially funny scene has a rival artist dance to techno music while covered in ears in his self-satisfied, up-its-own-ass act. This is a funnier movie than I expected, although much of the humour is of the deadpan variety. I already mentioned Stewart's comic timing, but I also chuckled at Mortensen's outfit, which looks like something a ninja would wear, or perhaps pilfered from a Yohji Yamamato or Rick Owens collection. The wardrobe of the rest of the cast is less dramatic, aside from the rise of their pants. (Yes, yes, I'm talking about clothes again.)

But there's also a political dimension, as Mortensen is working undercover for the government to infiltrate a group of subversives, although it wasn't clear to me what exactly the ideological difference was between the two parties. The movie is not interested in political coherence, and seems cagey about the nature of the government's repression, although we do get a sense of atmospheric decay from the crumbling Greek locations, presence of analog technology (which leads to the sporadic use of different film and video formats), and scenes of political operatives carrying out grisly assassinations. (There is also the frequent presence of flies, which I found a bit on the nose.) I suppose there are similarities here to the vagueness with which Videodrome sketches out its political dimensions, but that movie at least put words to the villains' ideology, giving that element a certain charge.

"North America's getting soft, patrón, and the rest of the world is getting tough. Very, very tough. We're entering savage new times, and we're going to have to be pure and direct and strong, if we're going to survive them. Now, you and this cesspool you call a television station and your people who wallow around in it, your viewers who watch you do it, they're rotting us away from the inside. We intend to stop that rot."
I haven't seen Cronenberg's last few films, but there is a sense that he was getting more respectable over the last two decades. (I'd seen A History of Violence and Eastern Promises from that period. Both quite good, but aside from a few instances of extreme violence, fairly palatable to mainstream tastes.) So seeing him go back to the biopunk sensibilities of his earlier work, the stuff that speaks to me more directly, does make the movie pretty interesting in the context of his career, and I did mostly enjoy seeing him play around with those elements. But where movies like Videodrome, Scanners and Shivers (to take a few examples) work for me and this one doesn't is that those movies had a certain cohesion and forward momentum. You enter worlds that are fairly well defined and attach yourself to protagonists who are propelled through their narratives, all delivered with a feverish, punk rock energy. (Of those movies, Videodrome has the best leading man in James Woods, whose sleazy presence gives added queasiness to the proceedings.) This movie has no real interest in making its contextual elements cohere, and kind of ambles to its climax. Also, I appreciate that we all have different sensitivities to certain subject matter, but the fact that this movie places its dramatic crux on something as upsetting as a child autopsy completely alienated me from the final section. And that the movie closes with a scene of what looks like the worst YouTube food vlog in the world meant that I was not won back before the end credits rolled.