‘Crimes Of The Future’ Review: David Cronenberg’s Unfinished Business With The Flesh Is Booming [Cannes]

David Cronenberg has unfinished business with the future, which is tricky, seeing as it already constitutes a significant slice of his past. His new film — titled “Crimes of the Future,” as in committed by rather than during that span of time — finds the master on the other side of his extended sojourn in high-minded literary adaptation, biopic quasi-prestige, and Tinseltown satire, back to playing the body-horror hits on which he made his name. He’s resumed pondering the permeability of flesh, how its penetration by surgical tools (the new sex, as we’re informed) can be just as intimately sensual as good old fornication. We’re treated to state-of-the-art grotesqueries as only he can visualize them, though pre-Cannes binge-watchers of the classic nasties will note an increased focus on the theory underpinning the erotic violence and violent eroticism “juicy with meaning” over the acts themselves. A talkier, plot-heavier script than usual, going all in on the clandestine warring factions most immediately reminiscent of “Scanners,” chances inertia on its way to introspection well worth the wade.

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Yet for all his consideration of past and future, Cronenberg’s chiefly preoccupied with his place in the present. As an auteur making a grand, grisly homecoming, the major departure lies in his choice to designate an artist to serve as his protagonist and implied surrogate, teasing autobiographical subtext until it begs for mercy. The esteemed Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) ‘performs’ ghastly exhibitions with his partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux), as she manipulates a scarab-shaped interface to open his torso and remove the never-before-seen organs generated by his Accelerated Evolution Syndrome. Decay seems to be getting the better of Saul; despite the custom-fitted bed facilitating his sleep and the shifting chair angling his digestive tract so that food may move through it, he spends his offstage time in supine recuperation swathed in form-masking black cloth. Even when immobilized, he can still breathe contempt into his bon mots about the “escapist propaganda” clogging the local scene around the no-place of tomorrow he only prowls by night.

Like so many geniuses slouching toward his career’s final phase, he’s disappointed by a survey of his field, surrounded by lesser knock-offs of himself insulting him by mere association. He’s starved for subversion in a spiritually neutered age, more amenable to “acknowledgment and empowerment” than “anger and rebellion.” There’s nothing so overt in here as to qualify as an out-and-out diss, though one movie that deserves it happens to be playing at this very festival. With Saul as his mouthpiece, Cronenberg boils his weltanschauung down to the instantly immortal line “Infections, what happened to them?” Though the flinty attitude more closely recalls how Nicki Minaj referred to her imitators: “All these bitches is my sons, and I don’t want custody.” (Cronenberg’s literal son being the exception that proves the decline-minded rule.)

The coolly despairing vantage expands to a global scale as the film’s full scope comes into view, Saul and Caprice beset on both sides by agents of hostile change. To the right, there’s the starfuckery Nation Organ Registry, “drab little bureaucrats” (Kristen Stewart, speaking in an affected titter, and Don McKellar) trying to regulate and catalogue perversions they couldn’t dream of contriving themselves. To the left, there’s an underground cell of synthetic-candy-bar-eating terrorists on a mission to assimilate into pollution before it “[kills] our children from the inside out.” It’s nothing short of a miracle that this film was scripted and shot prior to the recent news bulletin about bloodstream microplastics, the anxiety of waste infiltrating our physiology right at the mutated heart of Cronenberg’s intellectual framework. For his hush-hush nocturnal meetups with a law enforcement official (Welket Bungué), Saul wanders through post-industrial wastelands littered with rusted-out signs of societal collapse. If everything is dying, could our only hope of survival rest in submission to the Earth’s deterioration?

The parting shot suggests as much, though it leaves Saul (and perhaps the man feeding him his ideology) with the lingering question of how to retain your edge in an industry and planet going to hell. The back half of the plot tracks an ante-raising new project involving the CGI corpse of a boy murdered by his mother to win an “Inner Beauty Pageant,” but as for Cronenberg, he can continue pushing the envelope simply by being himself. He announces his entry into what Adorno called Late Style with rubbery artificial textures and unnatural blocking, characters in dialogue with one another often cheating out until they’re both facing the camera in a direct address. Should this mark the end of a titan’s reign, it’s only the beginning of the end, the next feature of his post-hiatus comeback already in place. Just as his characters can live in a suspended state of rot, he can thrive within a world and culture in its death throes. In his reenergized perspectives on degeneration, he’s created one last safe haven for his fellow degenerates. [B+]

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