crash (w&d. cronenberg, w. j.g. ballard)

Crash is a movie which is constructed upon a brilliant premise. About forty minutes in, Elias Koteas’ mysterious and charismatic psychopath introduces a staging of James Dean’s fatal crash, using identical cars, which actually collide. The world of the movie and technology fused in a single moment. The love of speed, which has driven the twentieth century, impaled on the steering wheel of the fixed punctum of the cinema frame. This moment seems to connect Hollywood with Marinetti’s Futurism, with Ducournau’s Titane, the automobile as the death drive of progress. The fact that the characters all want to have sex in cars, all the time, the cars being their potential murderers, only exacerbates the Freudian connotations where sex and death are all part of the same turbulent psychological crisis towards which modernity, and us, its guests, is constantly accelerating.

Having reached this point, 45 minutes into the film, it then feels as though Cronenberg wasn’t entirely sure where to go next. The tension that is laced into the film like a corset in the opening, a place where anything might happens, starts to slip as the characters settle into a playful Schnitzler-esque ronde, seeking to either screw or kill one another in the next car accident they can provoke. The film seems to decelerate rather than accelerate, and the brilliance of the opening forty five minutes becomes a tail light moving out of range, speeding away into a parallel film in another dimension, a dimension Cronenberg’s film would die to crash through to, if only it hadn’t lost the map.

crimes of the future (w&d david cronenberg)

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. 

eastern promises (dir. cronenberg)

The film opens with a scene of dramatic violence. A barber tries to convince his son to cut his customer's throat. The son doesn't want to. The barber does it. The director shows the blood emanating from the great tear in the throat. The victim convulses and the audience flinches.

Cronenberg opens his movie with a scene of high drama. By the end, the drama has been extinguished. A child plays with its adopted family. A man sits in the restaurant he now controls. Their stories are far from over, but the film is moving on, and the credits roll.

This contrast between the implied dramatic weight of the film and the actual dramatic weight is curious. It could be interpreted as the director running out of steam, editing together a short cut ending because he wasn't sure how to finish it. However, the pace and the tone feel in keeping with the rest of the film, so it may be something else.

Increasingly, Cronenberg's films come to feel like fables. He has lost interest, if he ever had it, in the mechanics of plot. He creates characters who have a timlessness, belonging to timeless societies. The villains who arrive at the beginning of History of Violence could be from any stage of US history. They arrive like something out of a Western. The Russians from Eastern Promises belong to a secret criminal society that has a mythical, preternatural aura.

Cronenberg doesn't seem interested in the details of the drug smuggling the criminals are involved with. The revelation that Mortensen's character, Nikolai, is an undercover cop, seems incidental. He doesn't even seem interested in the brewing love affair between Mortensen and the fragrant Naomi Watts. What seems to fascinate him nowadays is the notion of how close the forces of anti-sociality, the secret codes of violence, are to our own society. How they are closer than we think, and when they arrive, they have no connection with the world as we see it, and their destructive power is incalculable.

Eastern Promises consciously pulls its punches. The audience knows this because we know how hard it can punch. The scenes of violence establish this - the throat cutting and the bath-house bloodbath. But just as we're anticipating the mother of all finales - it doesn't happen. The child survives and Naomi Watts sits in the garden wearing a pretty dress. Nickolai's takeover of his wing of the Russian mafia is painless, his mentor, Semyon, simply vanishes. It's like the Godfather with the ruthlessness implied but not demonstrated.

Cronenberg's movies no longer have the snap, crackle and pop of his earlier frightners. They are meditative works, where the violence has become a part of the scenery, rather than a means to a dramatic end. London is a grey, damp world in his movie, a land of no promise, and the forces of darkness are lurking, just around the corner.