We hadn’t seen David Cronenberg in Cannes since Maps to the stars eight years ago, him for so long one of his figureheads. He specifies that he experienced the mourning of his wife without much desire to shoot. But here he is again, fresh in memory of the scandal that his Crash caused in 1996. Festival-goers felt bad. Cries, boos in front of a film deemed provocative and too bloody. The filmmaker is still surprised. It accompanied decades later the restored version of the film at the Venice Film Festival. “It was an intense young audience who enjoyed it very much. ” The times are changing…
Certainly with Crimes of The Future (he took over the title and vaguely the material of one of his first works), the Torontonian finds the vein explored in many previous films: Dead Ringers, Scanners, ExistenZand others Videodrome. Between the mutation of bodies and machines, when new realities transform organs and scarred and tattooed skin becomes an art form and a mode of survival, this poet of the image finds food and drink.
In Crimes of The Future, shot in Athens after envisioning Toronto, in an unnamed future, the toxic environment creates disturbing mutations. An old performer, looking like a penitent and a masked monk (Viggo Mortensen, Cronenberg’s alter ego), hit by a destructive virus, exhibits the removal of his tattooed and reconstructed organs in front of the public and experiences delicious sensations at to have surgery. He no longer practices sex the old-fashioned way, despite the presence of his companion Caprice (Léa Seydoux), and the advances of the envoy from the Office of the National Organ Registry (Kristen Stewart) who follows and observes them.
Cronenberg returns here all the more to the haunting themes that have become his mark, since the screenplay for his last film had been written twenty years earlier. Nothing has changed. Not one iota. Yes but here it is! In the meantime, the climatic upheavals have accelerated, the pandemic has spilled its venom (and complicated the filming of the film), body art has become an art in its own right. He himself has aged. Then the planetary reality validates his anxieties. How will humanity be able to survive the monsters it has created? “People have legitimate reasons to wonder about the future,” he says. Cronenberg finds that the internet and keyboards that have become finger extensions, like the pandemic changing our view of the world, change the echo of the film.
When he is called a visionary, he replies that art is first and foremost an exploration of the human condition, but that certain creators can prefigure the future by pushing the signs they see to the extreme. The word obsessive themes makes him wince too. “It’s more about observation. The body is always the filmed object. »
Cronenberg sees human sexuality as increasingly complicated. “It already has physical, social and creative dimensions. The pandemic, the links on the Internet, the #MeToo movement have transformed it. One day, it will be necessary to have a certificate from its partners to be able to rub shoulders with it. »
The filmmaker has always declared himself without metaphysics. He considers that the body is the alpha and omega of existence, but claims to take great pleasure in building machines that constitute the extension of biology and modify its functions.
For him, Viggo Mortensen is a friend and collaborator with whom he communicates half-wordly. Working with Léa Seydoux and Kristen Stewart was an enriching experience. “Léa carries French culture within her and Kristen, her past in the Twilight Zone and then her career as an actress. They represent two universes. Initially, he wanted to entrust the role of Kristen to Léa who saw herself in the other character and won her case. “A correct intuition”, he believes.
In his film, between the wanderings of the hero, performances and operations, in places where mechanical arms are grafted onto bruised bodies, Crimes of the Future plays with incisive poetry, cuts the flesh with surgery, modifies faces. Beneath the apparent provocation of the images, an almost gentle fatality is discovered. This work is a nightmare but also an inventory without cynicism, with an often admirable camera placed on a city without cars or temporality, against the backdrop of a wrecked boat. This last opus is not its most caustic. The filmmaker with the white mane gains softness, but his dark romanticism touches new fibers. Its stylistic elegance sticks to the horrors of the future, of course, also to the old traditions of the circus and the “freak show”, in an Athens steeped in history, often reduced to empty streets, to signs in the Cyrillic alphabet on the signs , to passing shadows.
“The film is also a metaphor for the artist who offers his interiority to others with a kind of generosity. he says. And all the angst of a shattered world that audiences will see in Crimes of The Future may be nothing compared to the intimate projections a creator can express in it. Neither quite the same, nor quite different from the one he had imagined twenty years earlier, his film tells us that Cronenberg flies over the ages with his beacon still on. The promise of an upcoming thriller The Shrouds with Vincent Cassel also ensures that it has not finished disturbing us.