Pain is a essentially a thing of the past for some in David Cronenberg’s “ Crimes of the Future,” a dense, gorgeous and grotesque meditation on bodies, creation and art. Suffering, however, is still alive and well as everyone grapples with the enormity of that fact that human evolution has “gone wrong.”
This is a world in which bodies are mutating. Viggo Mortensen, playing Saul Tenser, forms new and novel organs regularly. Instead of simply removing the uninvited guests at a hospital, he and his partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux) have turned it into an opportunity for performance art. Invasive surgery and pain management have become things that individuals do themselves, with the help of custom, alien-like machines that hold and manipulate your body and anticipate pain.
Saul’s surgery, which Caprice performs, is a public spectacle, heavy with meaning and metaphor. His extracted organs become specimens for display.
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“Crimes of the Future” does not seem to have been crafted to shock and disturb. Cheap thrills are for the newbies. Cronenberg has things he wants to say: About art, about pain, about self sacrifice, about evolution, about creativity, about ethics, about sex and about beauty.
