In the future, people start developing weird organs and shit, which starts to blur the line between what is and isn’t considered “human”. Viggo Mortensen and Lea Seydoux are a team of performance artists who dutifully tattoo and register their newly acquired organs at Kristen Stewart’s office for “National Organ Registry”. Oh, and by “performance artists”, I don’t mean they don clown make-up and recite slam poetry or shit like that. I mean Viggo hops into his fleshy-pod while Lea performs a robo-autopsy on him WHILE HE’S STILL ALIVE as audience members gawk and salivate like extras from Café Flesh. You know, because “SURGERY IS THE NEW SEX!”
Crimes of the Future is probably the David Cronenbergiest David Cronenberg has ever David Cronenberged. After decades of making serious grown-up movies, The Man is back with a vengeance. It’s like all those years making mainstream films caused all his cinematic excesses and fetishes to bottleneck and when he finally uncorked that sucker, it went nuclear. Last week, in my review of Jean Rollin’s Dracula’s Fiancée, I wrote, “It has the confidence of a genre director in his twilight years gleefully indulging us with his cinematic fetishes one more time. I respect that kind of shit.” I could’ve easily been talking about David Cronenberg and Crimes of the Future.
It's got all his weird little touches. Growths, tumors, people being attached to machines that look like growths and tumors. It’s also chockfull of Cronenbergian dialogue containing unending pseudoscientific gobbledygook and he never for a second stops to explain any of it. As a lifelong fan of the man, I respect that kind of shit.
You know you’re in for something special right from the opening scene where a kid eats a trashcan. His mother knows, once shit like that starts happening, there’s only one option: Suffocate that little bugger in his sleep. I mean, first it’s trashcans. Then sofas. Next thing you know, they eat you out of house and home. Literally.
I also love how at one art show, the guy who sews a bunch of ears to his face and body is kind of looked down upon as a poseur because, after all, “the ears don’t work”. It may be the dystopian future, but we still must demand high standards from our artists. Goddamned, I love this movie.
There’s an intriguing question that is proposed about halfway through: Is Viggo just another mutant who’s popping out strange new organs, or is the “artist” willing these tumors into existence for the sake of art? Cronenberg is basically saying that art isn’t just some intangible thing that you pull out of thin air, but a living, organic part of the artist themselves that must be surgically removed and displayed. This point is further conveyed when someone asks Viggo if he’s working on anything new and he muses, “I don’t have a choice”.
Mortensen is excellent, grunting, grumbling and grousing, but with a playful twinkle in his eye the whole time. Seydoux is great too, but it’s Kristen Stewart who steals the movie by acting exactly like Chloe Sevigny hopped up on Spanish Fly. In fact, this might be her horniest performance yet. That on its own accord makes Crimes of the Future highly recommended.
It’s also full of great lines like, “I found her attractive… in a bureaucratic kind of way”, “There’s no crime like the present”, “Watching you filled me with the desire to cut my face open”, and “I’m sorry. I’m not very good at the old sex”. I never thought anything would surpass Videodrome’s mantra of “Long Live the New Flesh”, but “Surgery is the New Sex” comes awful close.
In short, Crimes of the Future is a goddamned masterpiece. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it after I saw it, and I already want to watch it again. It gets under your skin and demands to be reckoned with, just like a Cronenbergian tumor.
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