Now playing in US cinemas; UK dates pending
SURGERY is the new sex â or at least it is in the world envisioned by David Cronenberg in his latest outing, Crimes of the Future, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last month.
The story takes place in an unsettling future, where humans have adapted to an environment they have polluted for decades â or is it centuries, perhaps millennia? In this dystopia, body modification represents a form of entertainment and offers new scientific objects to analyse and dissect.
The movie opens with a shot of a boy (Sozos Sotiris) standing by the sea. He is scolded by his mother (Lihi Kornowski), who forbids him from eating âanything he findsâ. That night, the mother discovers her son crunching on a plastic bucket and she chokes him with a pillow, leaving the corpse for his father (Scott Speedman) to find.
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We soon meet two other characters â Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen), an ageing celebrity performance artist who can grow unidentified organs, and his loyal partner Caprice (LĂ©a Seydoux). These storylines slowly converge, promising to reveal something crucial about our speciesâ future. Any more details about these characters would probably warrant a spoiler warning.
Despite this intriguing opening, two large flaws prevent the film from developing into a credible sci-fi tale with Cronenbergâs usual transgressive edge. The first lies in its internal logic. Although the attempt to create a future where our bodies take centre stage and regulate power dynamics and social interactions is compelling, Cronenberg breaks many of the laws that appear to govern it.
The widespread use of surgery is justified by the fact that humans can no longer feel pain. Yet many characters are shown to experience sexual pleasure â or at least some kind of enjoyment â through their surgery. So, what do they actually feel? Do some people experience sensation, while others have lost the ability? Why? These important questions are left hanging.
We are also shown people performing all kinds of advanced surgery â sealing shut eyes and mouths, extracting and tattooing organs, cutting deep into every inch of their body and more. Most of this activity isnât visible after a few minutes or hours, but some people do display marks. It seems that human bodies have become immune to infection. However, people arenât immortal and can be killed â an old-school drill to the temple proves highly effective, for example.
While Cronenberg is evidently crafting a work of science fiction, this lack of explanation fuels a sense of incoherence. Setting a few, clear rules governing this world would have increased the potential to make it a believable place, no matter how weird and unlikely it might appear.
The second flaw is the acting, notably Kristen Stewartâs. She plays Timlin, a creepy assistant who works with an investigator named Wippet (Don McKellar) at a clandestine branch of government called the National Organ Registry, which classifies new organs.
Stewart imbues her role with the same hesitancy she showed as Princess Diana in Spencer â though without the upper-class English accent â and this ensures that her character is at the centre of several embarrassing moments. From her first appearance, we struggle to believe that she is any sort of public official, or that she has developed a morbid fascination with Tenser and Caprice, and their disturbing practices.
While not exactly bad, the acting seems to be undermined by the dark humour running through the film. While it is good to see that Cronenberg isnât taking himself too seriously, the humour displayed here doesnât emerge organically. Instead, it makes the picture seem more chaotic, as the sometimes nonsensical dialogue destroys any serious emotional development, reducing the characters to caricatures.
These imperfections render the directorâs attempt to create a transgressive discourse on human evolution almost irrelevant. All in all, Crimes of the Future feels like a missed opportunity. It had some of the initial ingredients to make an unusual sci-fi story, but it failed to grip me, and led only towards a predictable ending.
And yet, the complexity of this work and its radical artistic choices are guaranteed to divide audiences. On those ground alone, we are sure to hear more about it.
