Rumors about
Crimes of the Future,
the latest film by one of the great provocateurs of contemporary cinema, the Canadian David Cronenberg, had been unleashed for days.
After the triumph at the last Cannes of
Titane,
by Julia Ducournau, a film that updated many of the ideas of Cronenberg's cinema, it seemed that the master of transgression and body terror still had the last word.
There was talk of fainting before so much vision of viscera, of images of unbearable cruelty.
Nothing of that.
After the screening of the long-awaited film, a certain disappointment was palpable —that dismissive “well, it wasn't that big of a deal”—, which ran through the corridors of the Cannes festival like a cruel verdict on a work that, despite the fact that as a whole it knows little You have fascinating ideas.
In contrast, the Directors' Fortnight was screening
De Humani Corporis Fabrica
, by documentary filmmakers and visual artists Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, members of the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Laboratory and authors of the dazzling documentary
Leviathan.
With their immersion in the bodies of a hospital, Paravel and Castaing-Taylor did turn the guts of many of the spectators (some even left) in a room that, despite the drink, applauded an experience as brutal as it was revealing.
But back to the man of the day, Cronenberg.
Not even the most apprehensive covered their eyes before the new film by the director of
La Mosca
or
Crash.
Among other reasons, because the characters in this apocalyptic, dark and very melancholic film are very far from the Shakespearean Shylock and, if they are punctured, they definitely no longer bleed.
The protagonist, played by actor Viggo Mortensen, is a
performance artist,
“the new Picasso”, who together with his main collaborator and partner (Léa Seydoux) removes the tumors from his convulsive body live in surgery sessions that mix trauma, therapy, sex and creation.
The future world that Cronenberg presents is a great metastasis where the human body no longer suffers, physical pain has disappeared and flesh is just a field open to creation on a planet destroyed and corrupted by plastic.
Crimes of the Future
is a small-production film, shot in Greece with scant means, to which the veteran filmmaker makes prodigious use.
To compose his apocalyptic painting, the rust of two stranded ships, the grimy facades of buildings that evoke the ruins of a finished industrial society and the sick face of a deranged transhumanism are enough.
Technology has devoured everything and what remains are some very strange devices, with the appearance of slimy aliens, to which those bodies are plugged in, in which almost nothing works anymore.
Of all, the most original has to do with that trend in contemporary art around the body, illness and the cyborg renaissance.
Through the face and the deformations of his characters, Cronenberg tells us about a future of mutated viscera increasingly distant from the old human bodies.
All of Viggo Mortensen's encounters, always hidden under a black cloak, with the police inspector played by Welket Bungué are a wonder of visual plasticity, of total dark beauty.
The film is intended as a metaphor for climate change and how plastic corrodes us inside and out.
But that is where he runs aground in a speech that is too simple and predictable.
The other film in competition yesterday,
Decision to Leave,
by the director of
The Maiden,
the South Korean Park Chan-wook, winner of the Special Jury Prize in 2003 for
Oldboy
, is an
elegant and very meticulous
noir about
love fou
between a Korean policeman and a Chinese murder suspect.
An absorbing and sensual film that ends up being a treatise on solitary confinement and sex in the days of mobile phones and WhatsApp messages.
A love story starring the wonderful actress Tang Wei whose seductive
femme fatale
profile Park Chan-wook nails with one of those perfect shots: a woman walking among the rocks in heels can only bring doom.
His sometimes too elaborate shots can end up being a bit tiresome, but Chan-wook is a virtuoso and most of his visual ideas make for a very refined and particular climax.
If we add to that the musical and verbal twists of a story about an insomniac policeman, with a fine culinary palate and evident problems of obsessive-compulsive disorder, we will end up with him dragged into the abyss by a fatal love whose pure icy eroticism burns.
Exclusive content for subscribers
read without limits
subscribe
I'm already a subscriber