Autopsy shows – Weekend – Kommersant

At the box office Crimes of the Future, David Cronenberg’s first film in eight years. The Canadian classic hasn’t shot his own scripts for a long time, and Future Crimes has every chance of evoking sharp nostalgia among those fans of the director for whom Car Crash and Existence are closer to Vice for Export and Cosmopolis.

Text: Vasily Stepanov

Conditional Southern Europe, or Greece, or Sicily, a strange time. Human civilization as we know it is in its last days. The plaster is crumbling and the tiles are falling off. Not so much from the buildings (although the housing stock here is in a terrible state), but from the human species itself. The reason for this is a sharp jump in the evolution of Homo sapiens. People of the future cease to feel pain en masse and go crazy because of it. There is no stability, one self-harm on my mind. In addition, the bodies of some particularly fortunate individuals acquire the ability to grow new organs unknown to science – either tumors or glands. What are they needed for? Leave them or take them out? The medical council will not tell you this either.

One of the lucky mutants, the world-famous performance artist Saul Tenzer (Viggo Mortensen), turns his mutilated body into a body art proving ground. As the womb spawns another curious organ, Tenzer places himself in the hands of his mistress-assistant, Caprice (Lea Seydoux), who first tattoos the neoplasm with ingenious probes and then performs a public retrieval using an automated home autopsy box called the Sark. In the name of the device, phenomena that are equally close to Cronenberg – “sarcoma” and “sarcasm” – clearly grow together. Between the scary and the funny, the whole film unfolds.

According to Cronenberg, in the future, anesthetized autopsies of still living bodies and other anatomical performances will become a fashionable element of everyday life. Once upon a time, a person dreamed of getting rid of the bodily, of taming the flesh, but now he dreams of not only knowing it, but turning it into a continuation of his ornate thought. People cut themselves and sew, equated the body to the canvas. And in general, “surgery is the new sex,” as Timlin, the creepy official from the New Organ Registration Department (Kristen Stewart played this role with unexpected comedic overtones), heartfeltly states.

Despite the well-known radicality of the last thesis, fans of David Cronenberg will be hard pressed to find something truly traumatic for the eyes. In the end, Cronenberg began to expand the composition of human organs through household appliances and mechanical units a long time ago. Of course, it is interesting to see how the hero of Viggo Mortensen opens the zippered abdominal cavity in front of his mistress, and she sticks her tongue in there, or how they indulge in medico-erotic procedures, but by and large these are Cronenberg practices from the eighties and nineties that are too familiar to the audience. It’s just that over the past 20 years we have lost the habit of them a little – after all, in the 2000s, the author switched from bodily to social mutations, studied the corrosion not of the flesh, but of the spirit.

The world of “Crimes of the Future” is a return home, to tissues and mucosa. Such a return has its own comfort and warmth. It’s good that the bioengineer Cronenberg in his body horror (thanks to Cronenberg’s eternal collaborator in the artistic production workshop – Carol Speer) can do without smartphones, designing the future with a special analogue chic; here even the archive of human mutations is maintained without the help of computers – employees of a special archive put paper diagrams and drawings into folders with ribbons. It should be noted that the idea of ​​medicine as a spectacle and anatomical theater as a public space comes from the depths of the 19th century.

Next year, Cronenberg will turn eighty, and before it’s too late, he sends greetings to the young viewer from the 21st century from the past, which once recklessly believed in progress. Today, faith in technology lies off the coast of the Old World on the half-sunk liner Costa Concordia (the film opens with an overturned ship), while Homo novus, a man born of the miasma of technology and keenly longing for only one thing – the satisfaction of numerous desires, prowls the beach in search of edible plastic garbage. There are too many of them, and it is almost impossible to choose really relevant items from a voluminous wishlist. What is more important: comfort? identity? development? ecology?

Neither did Cronenberg, who valiantly attempts to combine the bodily transmutations of Videodrome with the sexual affects of Car Crash and the intellectual fantasy of Existence. In this mishmash of meanings, each viewer will hasten to find something of their own (there is no single road to truth and a bright future for a long time – Cronenberg, in particular, about this). Obviously, there will be those who need very little for complete cinematic satisfaction – just look into the steely eyes of Leah Seydoux at the very moment when she looks at Kristen Stewart with curiosity. Well, it’s not a crime.

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