Art, surgery and mutations - Crimes of the Future - Marina's review

(Photos are courtesy of the Cannes Film Festival)

Great expectation at Cannes Film Festival 2022 per Crimes of the Future, latest effort by Canadian director David Cronenberg, here in the running for the much sought-after Palme d'Or. In this important feature film of yours, Cronenberg resumed, therefore, a discourse that began in the seventies, going through a further stage of a process that began more than fifty years ago, in which the human body evolves, it undergoes important changes and also adapts to new technologies, in a world where, by now, technology itself plays the role of absolute protagonist.

Saul (played by Viggo Mortensen) he is a body artist capable of developing completely new organs within his body, surgically removed during his performances by his assistant Caprice (Léa Seydoux). Within a large group of artists who, while dealing with body art they seem to produce only junk art, the two seem almost the "survivors" in a world in which, by now, everything is focused on spectacularity, without thoroughly investigating the true essence of what surrounds us.

The questions Cronenberg raised in Crimes of the Future are anything but simple. Who we are? E, mostly, what are we becoming? In Crimes of the Future bodily changes are observed as pure manifestations of beauty in the purest sense, although they are not always accepted as a natural process of transformation. Particularly significant, about that, is the figure of Brecken, a child, a sort of "creature" studied at the table, who is never accepted by his mother, scared that her son continues to eat plastic. His murder at the beginning of the feature film soon made him a sacrificial victim capable of making the whole world understand much "greater" truths.

Dark environments, disturbing music, beds with mutant shapes that adapt to the movements of the human body, surgical operations without anesthesia are the essence of this feature film. The human being no longer feels pain. Unlike, surgery itself is seen as a new evolutionary form of the sexual act. With Crimes of the Future David Cronenberg gave us a monumental work, magnetic and wonderfully disturbing. A film that has definitely turned out to be a cut above the average of the works featured in this one 75° edition of the Cannes Film Festival.

marina fears