“Surgery is the new sex.” So says Timlin (Kristen Stewart), delivering a line that should tell you, all on its own, that you’re watching a David Cronenberg picture. Like The Fly, Crash, eXistenZ, and others, Crimes of the Future (not to be confused with Cronenberg’s 1970 film with the same title) breaks the boundaries of what the human body can be. The film depicts a near-future where humans have begun to evolve in strange, unpredictable ways, including a diminished capacity for pain. This allows for a gruesome trend: body-altering performance art of the sort practiced by Caprice (Lea Seydoux) and Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen). While Tenser—who suffers from a condition in which extraneous organs grow inside of him—rests in a retrofitted autopsy device, Caprice surgically removes the malignant organs before a live audience. Some, like Stewart’s Timlin, find the demonstration both appalling and arousing. I wish I had as strong of a reaction. For all its inventiveness—including an “orchid bed” that Tenser sleeps in, which organically attaches itself to his hands, and a bony “breakfast chair” that adjust the sitter while they eat for better digestion—Crimes of the Future mostly asks familiar, Cronenbergian questions: What is the relationship between pleasure and pain? Do we control our bodies or do they control us? At what point do physiology and technology become one? A confusing conspiracy subplot is layered on top of these musings to add suspense, but it seems to be interested in different questions and never quite gels with the main narrative. And so we’re largely left with an arresting return to the sort of wild work Cronenberg delivered in the 1980s and 1990s, if one where the shock is ironically missing.
(6/1/2022)
