Crimes of the Future
Directed by David Cronenberg
Running time: 1hr47 | REVIEWED BY CATHERINE BRAY
Viggo Mortensen and Léa Seydoux in Crimes of the Future
Sexual intimacy is a peculiar thing, isn’t it? It involves building something, however fleetingly, that didn’t exist before, between two (or more) people. It also involves taking apart the socialised self, revealing a glimpse of the person underneath the public version of yourself that you’ve created. Something about that construction/deconstruction is thrilling. In David Cronenberg’s deliciously kinky Crimes of the Future, a couple map sexual intimacy onto a very different constructive/deconstructive act: surgery. “Surgery is the new sex,” as one character puts it.
Viggo Mortensen plays Saul Tenser, partner to Léa Seydoux’s surgeon, Caprice. He offers his body up to her scalpel, and she proceeds to slice him open, pale abdominal skin parting like a silken curtain to disclose delicate pink, white and red innards, glistening under the lights, unexpectedly exposed.
Crimes of the Future is not just about sexualised surgery, though: in the world in which the film takes place, some people, including Tenser, find themselves growing new kinds of organs, ones they wish to be rid of. The government is rather suspicious about all this slicing and dicing: surely no good can come of it. Well, it’s none of the state’s business what consenting individuals do with their own bodies, says David Cronenberg, hitting on a number of contemporary debates, but from a vantage point so throughly Cronenbergian that it’s hard to imagine the film being cited in any major court cases about the value of bodily autonomy.
Surgery as sex and the removal of mutant organs not enough for you? Don’t worry, there’s also a performance art element at play here for your delectation: before she removes Tenser’s new organs, Caprice tattoos them. And the sex/surgery takes place in front of an appreciative crowd who land somewhere between the audience for performance art and punters at a live sex show (obviously there’s overlap there), adding themes of voyeurism/exhibitionism to Crimes of the Future’s swirling vortex of fetishistic fun and games.
Perhaps in an effort to exert some measure of discipline over this multi-limbed body-horror beast, the tone of the film is tightly controlled. I’m not sure that fully covers it, actually. The tone of this film is not just tightly controlled, it has been gagged, chloroformed, bound and stuffed into the trunk of a car; it will not be getting away from Cronenberg any time soon.
I would be interested to see an edit with some of the thematic elements pared back or simplified a little, with the filmmaking technique itself correspondingly given a little more space to breathe. Perhaps it wouldn’t work, I don’t know. But there’s very little vulnerability here, and while that steely approach is satisfying, in Cronenberg’s very best work (for me: Dead Ringers, Crash, The Fly), it’s the collision of human frailty with the brutality of surgery/machinery/metamorphosis (delete as applicable) which produces classic Cronenbergian sensation, that constructive/deconstructive intimacy.
CRIMES OF THE FUTURE (2022) Written by David Cronenberg | Shot by Douglas Koch | Edited by Christopher Donaldson
Selected for the Competition at the 75th Cannes Film Festival
