William Shakespeare looked upon the world and saw a stage; David Cronenberg sees an operating theatre.
The Canadian auteur's latest film marks a moodily captivating and surprisingly funny return – after more than two decades exploring some of his less gruesome interests – to something like body horror, the subgenre in which he made his distinctive mark, as both pioneer and master.
Its beguiling title pinched from one of his early (otherwise unrelated) features, Crimes of the Future posits a world in which physical pain is largely a thing of the past and pleasure is increasingly derived from surgical modifications of the body.
As Kristen Stewart's character, the nervy Timlin, incisively puts it: "Surgery is the new sex."
This kind of pleasure, what's more, extends beyond surgeon (whether qualified or self-proclaimed) and patient to all those who might bear witness to such eroticised, exploratory acts of violence: the reputation of celebrity power couple Saul Tenser and Caprice, played by Viggo Mortensen (Green Book) and Léa Seydoux (No Time to Die), rests on their zeitgeist-y performance art, consisting of her excisions of the mutant internal organs he is wont to sprout.
Their practice evokes that of the French artist Orlan, whose primary canvas over the course of her varied, decades-long career has always been her own body: between 1990-1993, she underwent a series of plastic surgery interventions, each meant to remodel one aspect of her visage in the image of one of western art's most iconic female subjects: the Mona Lisa, Botticelli's Venus. These operations were broadcast live.
"I can observe my own body without suffering," wrote Orlan in her Carnal Art Manifesto (1989). "I can see myself all the way down to my viscera, a new stage of gaze. … Darling, I love your spleen, I love your liver, I adore your pancreas and the line of your femur excites me."
To the rapt onlookers in Crimes of the Future, with their camcorders in hand, Tenser's apparently extraneous organs represent a certain kind of highbrow titillation. To government officials, on the other hand, they are evidence that human evolution is "going wrong" – so frets Wippet (stalwart of Canadian indie cinema Don McKellar, carrying over from Cronenberg's last sci-fi venture, 1999's eXistenZ), head paper-pusher at the barely-formed National Organ Registry, and Timlin's boss.
That there are further "insurrectional" evolutionary tendencies at work is intimated by the young boy munching contentedly on a plastic garbage bin in the film's opening sequence. (And yet, the notion of a future in which our digestive systems could adapt to processing plastics strikes as less fanciful than one in which the greatest cultural cachet is wielded by performance artists.)
At 79, Cronenberg – with his shock of white hair, sporting goggle-eyed mountaineering glasses on the Cannes red carpet at the Crimes premiere earlier this year – could be said to resemble precisely the kind of mad scientist unlikely to feature in his films. His sci-fi has never fit the chrome-and-test tubes mould; has never been slick or even all that 'futuristic'.
The Videodrome director has always preferred his technology to look man-made – whether in the conventional sense of the word, as with the nightmarishly baroque gynaecological instruments used in Dead Ringers, or in a more lyrical one: the putty-pink game controllers from eXistenZ appear to have been made of some fleshy material; to be made of man.
The near-future of Crimes — which, rest assured, has its share of delightfully Cronenbergian devices — is amber-tinted and neo-noir-ish in effect, down to the minimalism of the run-down, industrial sets and the pulsing synths of Howard Shore's score.
Shrouded in black garb, Mortensen resembles both a ninja and Ingmar Bergman's vision of Death from The Seventh Seal, in equal measure. A regular collaborator of Cronenberg's beginning with 2005's A History of Violence, he brings a new and intriguing timidity to this role, which lingers even as he doggedly pokes his nose further and further into dangerous underworld dealings.
The film curves inexorably towards a revelation of the political dimensions inherent in the corporeal. (Orlan again: "Carnal art is not interested in the plastic surgery result, but in the process of surgery, the spectacle and discourse of the modified body which has become the place of a public debate.")
Of course, Cronenberg himself is no stranger to concepts of the trans- or post-human, nor to the erotics of open wounds; of flesh pierced by metal – such was the purview of Crash, his adaptation of the JG Ballard novel, which scandalised Cannes in 1996.
Crimes is itself actually modelled on a 20-year-old screenplay – talk about new flesh on old bones. It's Cronenberg's sixth film to have competed for the Palme d'Or, and, coming off the back of Julia Ducournau's win for her flashy, Crash-inspired Titane, was hardly likely to spark any moral panics.
The arthouse establishment of today, it seems, has well and truly caught up to Cronenberg and his cinema of polymorphous perversions, and has even acquired the taste for a little mechanophilia along the way.
But the pleasures of this film do not derive so much from the shock of the new (though the ceremonial organ harvesting scenes are to be savoured, if you're into that sort of thing) so much as its slippery tone, hypnotic and enriched by a wealth of arch, quietly hilarious dialogue – best appreciated in a state of openness, of surrender to Cronenberg's surgical-gloved directorial hand.
Crimes of the Future is in cinemas now.
