Crimes of the Future feels like a bonne bouche served up by the bastard child of Genet and Foucault. It’s at the same time frothy and intense, revolting and enticing. It’s also a fitting return to body horror, and although it’s likely the director will not have seen Titane before he devised and shot his latest film, there’s a weird feedback loop at work here. Foucault was the first writer I know of to elucidate the concept of the bio-human, and Genet’s writing eroticised the scar. Cronenberg spins the beguiling idea of the potential for the internal organs to evolve in a post-human fashion. This also sets up the conceit of a beauty pageant for the organs, judged on their aesthetic merits. This is a glorious subversion of the idea of the external beauty pageants, or at least if would be if Cronenberg’s casting didn’t seem so reliant on established beauty norms. Every woman in the film more than lives up to contemporary notions of movie star beauty, and we don’t get to see their insides, only those of the hawklike Vigo Mortensen.
As such, the film is perhaps less radical than it might aspire to be, and the absence of a clinical through line also seems to stymie the film’s philosophical growth. Nevertheless, this is a film which is almost inebriated with ideas. The fact it takes place in a futurist Greece only adds to the mix. One of the many strands that evolves is the notion of a post-human which can regurgitate the plastics and other synthetic human products which are polluting and potentially killing the planet. This seems like a great idea, on a cinematic but also a practical level. However, the narrative eventually hinges on the efforts of the vice squad to eliminate these bio-ecologists, for reasons which remain nebulous.
It’s one of those films that is almost overripe for post doctoral analysis. At times brilliant, at times frustratingly slight, as with the throwaway conclusion. Still, the post-humanists are going to be happy.
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