David Cronenberg is sure that the surgery scenes in ‘Crimes of the Future’, will create controversy. His first feature film in eight years takes him back to his roots in body horror with Viggo Mortensen and Léa Seydoux playing surgical artists publicly displaying the metamorphosis of human organs in avant-garde performances.
With the controversy ahead
In the film, a National Organ Registry researcher (Kristen Stewart) is convinced that organ transplants will usher in the next phase of human evolution. ‘Crimes of the Future’ premieres at Cannes this month to appear in the United States on June 3 and Cronenberg is clear about what is going to happen and told Deadline:
“I expect dropouts at Cannes, and that means a lot to me. There are some very strong scenes. I mean, I’m sure we’ll have dropouts in the first five minutes of the movie. I’m sure of that. Some people who have seen the film have said that they think the last 20 minutes will be very hard for people and they will leave the theater. One guy said he almost had a panic attack. People always get out and the seats squeak a lot when you get up, because the seats fold back and hit the back of the seat. So, you hear clack, clack, clack.”
Cronenberg wrote the script more than 20 years ago and revisited it during the COVID-19 quarantine and discovered that the future is even more horrible now than it was then. Cronenberg changed the title, borrowing from his 1970 63-minute film; however, the two works are not related:
“It will be the first time I see it with an audience that knows very little about the film and therefore I will laugh where I think they should or should not be. Of course, there is also the question of language and subtitles, etc., but French viewers who have seen the film certainly get the humor. Much of the humor is derived from the dialogue, so you need to know what the dialogue is to capture the humor. But yeah, like all my movies, it’s fun. It’s a fun movie.”
Cronenberg premiered ‘Crash’ at the festival in 1996, but now find enough differences:
“For one thing, there’s really no sex in the movie. I mean, there’s eroticism and there’s sensuality, but of course part of what the movie says, and one of the characters says it very directly, is that surgery is the new sex. If you accept that, then yes, there is sex in the movie, because there is surgery! So, people might get put off by that. They may feel disgusted to the point of wanting to leave, but that’s not the same as being outraged like in ‘Crash’. However, I have no idea what is really going to happen. I guess that’s the description of this film: it will either attract or repel people.”
“My understanding of what is extreme, what is too violent, what is too sexual, really has to do with the tone of the movie, within the world of the movie. That is my area. That’s where I’m operating. Now, once you’ve done that, you can have distributors say, ‘I can’t distribute this film in my country,’ because it’s too much this or it’s too much that. And at that point, you’re like, ‘Well, okay, too bad. You can’t see it. Alright.'”
about censorshipthe director of ‘The fly’ assures:
“I mean, there are so many approaches to censorship around the world, subtle and non-subtle, that you would go crazy. I mean, if you take as much censorship as possible seriously, you won’t say a word. you can’t talk The way the #MeToo movement can be used as a censorship tool, for example, it’s a new approach, a new little arabesque on censorship, and it’s used politically in that way or resisted as a censorship movement rather than a movement of some sort of release. So, you involve all these complexities. Again, you’re better off ignoring it, and then you get hit, I mean, you’re out there. You are very vulnerable. You are exposing yourself as an artist. Part of what you do is put yourself out there, and therefore you’re susceptible to all kinds of criticism, anger, outrage and everything else.”