Posted yesterday at 9:30 a.m.
Since the presentation of Crimes of the Future at the Cannes Film Festival, it was widely said that David Cronenberg was making a return to body horror, a genre of which he is the absolute master, yet less present in his cinema of the last 20 years. It is true that some parallels can be drawn here with Crashespecially in this kind of mutation of carnal desire (“Surgery is the new sex”, it is said), but not only.
The first draft of the screenplay Crimes of the Futurewhich the veteran filmmaker signs alone, having been written at the end of the 1990s – practically in the wake of Crash –, fans will obviously establish links with films like Videodrome, naked lunch and eXistenZ. This new feature, Cronenberg’s first since Maps to the Starsis part of the perfect continuity of a consistent work, built around the ethical and social questions of human and technological evolution.
We can be fascinated – or not – by this dystopian world. One can be attracted – or not – by the clinical and surgical universe in which Cronenberg plunges the viewer. We can also deplore the shortcomings of a scenario where tracks are abandoned along the way and where the trajectory of certain characters appears rather vague.
That said, Crimes of the Future (The crimes of the future is the title in French) is masterfully staged and looks like a real work of art from an aesthetic point of view. The composition of the images by Douglas Koch, the anxiety-provoking musical score of faithful accomplice Howard Shore, the impeccable artistic direction of production designer Carol Spier (accomplice of Cronenberg since The Dead Zone), in short, everything is at the service of the inventive and twisted imagination of Canada’s most famous filmmaker.
If the quirky way in which Kristen Stewart plays her character surprises a little (the actress borrows the same jerky delivery as in spencer), there is reason to salute here the performance of Viggo Mortensen, formidable in the skin of an avant-garde artist making a show of his organic mutations. In the role of the amorous surgeon, Léa Seydoux is also excellent. Surprisingly sensual in such a context, the two actors evoke the transformation of human nature in a world where it tends to gradually change its genetic code.
Crimes of the Future (The crimes of the future) is playing in theaters in the original version, in the original version with French subtitles and in the French dubbed version.
sci-fi drama
Crimes of the Future
(VF: The crimes of the future)
David Cronenberg
With Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, Kristen Stewart
1:47 a.m.