(David Cronenberg, 2022, Canada-France-UK-Greece, 107 minutes)
Kirby Dick's 1997 documentary SICK: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist doesn't just depict the life and career of performance artist Bob Flanagan (1952-1996), but of his personal and professional partnership with photographer and BDSM practitioner Sheree Rose. It would have been fascinating with Bob alone, but it's more moving with Sheree in the mix.
Bob had cystic fibrosis, and he and Sheree knew that his time on Earth was limited. Their work involved pain, which Sheree inflicted. It was an expression of love. It was also a way to generate publicity and income.
The same year Bob passed away at the age of 43, David Cronenberg completed Crash, his instantly-notorious 1996 adaptation of J.G. Ballard's 1973 novel (Fine Line Features delayed the film for a year due to Ted Turner's disgust). As with Dick's documentary, the film would have been fascinating with James Spader's movie producer James alone, but it's more moving with Deborah Kara Unger's Catherine, James's wife, in the mix.
James enters the "car crash set," as the Normal once put it, after a vehicular collision that results in a gnarly leg brace that longtime Cronenberg cinematographer Peter Suschitzky (Naked Lunch) films like a fetish object (Canadian DP Douglas Koch picks up his mantle in the new film with elegant ease).
Soon, James and Catherine enter an underground society of car tattoos and crash-related performance art. The pain, the rejection of societal norms, the proximity to death--all of these things reinvigorate their stagnant sex life.
Crimes of the Future isn't a remake of Crash or of Cronenberg's identically-titled, if visually and thematically dissimilar 1970 Crimes of the Future, and I have no idea if Cronenberg is familiar with Bob Flanagan and/or SICK, but it's at its best when it focuses on the Bob-and-Sheree/James-and-Catherine-like relationship between future-world performance artists Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen, in his fourth go-round with the filmmaker) and Caprice (Léa Seydoux, in her first). Saul suffers for his art; Caprice inflicts the suffering. With her assistance, he grows new organs, which she removes surgically at public events. And then they start the process all over again.
From the start, Saul doesn't appear well. He sounds congested, rarely raises his voice above a whisper, and shrouds his body, like a Star Wars Sith, whenever he leaves their shadowy, minimalist lair (63-year-old Mortensen, 27 years Seydoux's senior, has never looked older). It's an illness he appears to have brought on himself through the weird, unappetizing food on which he subsists--a Cronenberg specialty--and the time he spends in the skeletal-womb-shaped Sark machine that produces new organ growth.
Saul doesn't seem to care that his vocation is making him ill. The tension in the narrative comes more from outside the home, specifically from two bureaucrats, Timlin (Kristin Stewart, the second Twilight lead to join Team Cronenberg) and Wippet (writer/director Don McKellar, who appeared in Cronenberg's 1999 eXistenZ), from the National Organ Registry, a semi-legitimate organization, and from a genetically-evolved father and resistance leader, Lang (Felicity's Scott Speedman), who has a particularly odd and disturbing request regarding Saul and Caprice's public performances.
How Saul and Caprice deal with these encounters will affect their relationship, because everybody seems to want a piece of their act--if not a piece of them. The furtive, squirrely Timlin, for instance, doesn't just have a professional interest in Saul, she finds his scientifically-modified body sexually stimulating, too. (Caprice describes the groupie-like character as "creepy"). The way Saul and Caprice react to these strange and possibly deranged individuals adds a low-key thriller aspect to the proceedings.
Love stories lie at the heart of many Cronenberg films, even if he isn't normally described as a romantic. These aren't necessarily healthy relationships, to say the least, but that doesn't mean he isn't interested in the ways people fall for each other--and try to keep the passion alive.
Now 79, he was married to editor, cinematographer, and filmmaker Carolyn (Ziefman) Cronenberg, whom he met in 1979 when she served as a production assistant on Rabid, until her death in 2017. Like Sheree, like Caprice, she wasn’t just a life partner, but a professional one, as well.
I'm not suggesting that their relationship inspired Crimes of the Future; I'm suggesting that their relationship inspired much of his filmography.
Not to give too much away, but Caprice doesn't die at the end of the film. She's young and presumably healthy. She enjoys looking after Saul. He's like a son, a father, a husband, a pet, a project--he satisfies her every need.
Caprice is also, with Saul's cooperation, making him sick. Cronenberg doesn't suggest that his death is imminent, but nor does he suggest that he'll ever stop producing anatomical art. It's what he does, it's who he is. Aside from his partner, he doesn't appear to have--or want--anything else.
Crimes of the Future proves more open-ended than previous relationship-centered Cronenberg films, like the underappreciated M. Butterfly (1993) or his terrifying and heartbreaking adaptation of George Langelaan's 1957 short story The Fly (1986), making it simultaneously less immediately satisfying and yet more thought-provoking. The film ends, intentionally, with certain story strands and character arcs unresolved.
Granted, the film also includes two murders, and since the medical advancements of the future don't include reanimation, the victims are gone for good. Saul and Caprice aren't responsible. The two performance artists aren't killers—they're lovers. Even if that love could prove deadly in the end.
Crimes of the Future opens in Seattle on Friday, June 3, 2022. Images from CineVue (Seydoux and Mortensen), White Hot Magazine (Michel Delsol, Sheree Rose, and Bob Flanagan, Wedding Vows with ’S’ Cutting, 1994), The Lost Highway Hotel (Unger and Spader), Variety (Stewart and Mortensen), The Hollywood Reporter (Cronenberg and Cronenberg), and The Internet Movie Database (Geena Davis and Jeff Goldblum).
No comments:
Post a Comment