A dystopia where ‘surgery is sex’
David Cronenberg fans rejoice, because the Canadian body-horror maestro has made a film just for you. It has traces of Terry Gilliam’s analogue, retro-futuristic satire, and some bony biotechnology borrowed from Alien, but Crimes of the Future is essentially Cronenberg at his most Cronenbergish: a cerebral science-fiction puzzler in which rubbery torsos are sliced open and mysterious oracles make cryptic pronouncements that “surgery is the new sex”. Echoes of Scanners, Videodrome, Crash and Existenz can be heard everywhere. Even the title is one that Cronenberg has used before, for a film he made in 1970. The director, now 79, is playing his greatest hits.
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After a terrific prologue in which a boy munches contentedly on a plastic bin, Cronenberg introduces his main character, Saul Tenser, played by Viggo Mortensen. (All of the characters have “Saul Tenser”-ish names.) Saul’s weird ability to grow new internal organs may just prove that he is the next step in human evolution. But this is no superhero origin story. Saul is a performance artist, and whenever a new organ develops inside him, his partner Caprice, played by Léa Seydoux, tattoos it while it is still in his torso, and then cuts it out of him in front of an appreciative audience.
Crimes of the Future
Directed by: David Cronenberg
Starring: Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, Kristen Stewart
Length: 1 hour 47 minutes
Alas, not everyone is an art lover. The government is concerned about how fast the populace is mutating. Pain and infection are more or less a thing of the past (although Saul is still capable of wincing and groaning, as he demonstrates in every scene), and without them, what might we be capable of? That’s why the National Organ Registry keeps tabs on Saul’s latest growths, even though it is staffed by two of his biggest admirers, Wippet (Don McKellar) and Timlin (Kristen Stewart, who has little to do, despite getting third billing). And that’s why a policeman (Welket Bungué) from the New Vice Unit keeps having secret late-night assignations with him in an old shipyard. But why does a stranger (Scott Speedman) want Saul to conduct a public autopsy on his son? And why do two robo-bed technicians (Nadia Litz and Tanaya Beatty) keep turning up, except to provide a colossally gratuitous nude scene?
Structured as a hardboiled detective thriller, Crimes of the Future has plenty of provocative concepts and images that will put a grin on your face (not least the dancer who has several ears on his face), but you may find yourself willing the plot to pick up momentum, and the ickiness to get a whole lot ickier. At this stage, it seems, Cronenberg the idea-generator has a lot more energy than Cronenberg the writer-director. Crimes of the Future is a muted, gloomy affair, with the same slow, deliberate pace as Saul’s nocturnal shuffles around his unnamed home town. Seydoux’s performance stands out, because Caprice cares passionately about what is going on. (She wears her heart on her sleeve, if only metaphorically.) But most of her co-stars appear to be taking their tone from Mortensen, and he speaks entirely in whispers and coughs.
The film might have been livelier if it featured more people in more locations, but it raises the suspicion that Cronenberg simply didn’t have the budget to realise his vision in the detail he wanted. There’s a nice joke about performance artists being superstars, but most buskers draw larger crowds than Saul and Caprice ever do, and every street and room they visit is all but empty. Of course, Cronenberg might have been aiming to conjure up a barren featureless dystopia, but it seems more likely that his team found some dingy, empty buildings in Greece, where the film was shot, and didn’t have the money to fill them with furniture or decoration.
Not that all of the production’s shortcomings can be blamed on its budget. The script leaves every plot strand thread hanging, as if Cronenberg thought he was making the pilot episode of a TV mini-series – and with this cast, and this premise, what a fantastic mini-series it might be. As it is, though, Crimes of The Future returns pleasingly to the obsessions of his earlier films, without reaching the heights of many of them. If only the story had been allowed to do some more mutating of its own before it was put on screen.
★★★☆☆
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