I feel a certain obligation to write about the latest films from David Cronenberg and Peter Strickland, who have made such wonderful, singular auteurist genre films in the past. However, I didn't really get much out of either "Crimes of the Future" or "Flux Gourmet." Maybe this is because both films center around performance artists, who are perhaps the most insufferable creatures on Earth.
"Crimes of the Future" almost feels like a throwback, one of the first Cronenberg films in some time to fully embrace the body horror and high concept phantasmagoria of his early work. It takes place in the indeterminate future, in a world where human beings no longer feel pain, and no longer get sick. Their bodies have been modified and evolved to such an extent that it's questionable that they're still human. We spend most of the film observing a pair of performance artists, Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) and Caprice (Lea Seydoux), who perform surgery as part of their act, ridding Tenser of the organs he grows because of his "Accelerated Evolution Syndrome." Don McKellar and Kristen Stewart play government researchers, and Scott Speedman plays an evolutionary radical, part of a group that has modified themselves to digest plastic.
Cronenberg made a film in 1970 called "Crimes of the Future," with a few themes in common, but the 2022 film appears to be almost totally unrelated. However, Cronenberg fans will recognize that we're in familiar territory nonetheless. I like that this it feels very much like "Videodrome" or "Existenz," full of acts and images that suggest sexuality without ever being explicitly sexual. There's a mood of unease and conspiracy, with multiple factions clashing over shadowy agendas. Also, Cronenberg's monstrous, organic props are back, including a maw-like operating table and a writhing chair, covered in bony protrusions, meant to aid with digestive issues. Some of these visuals are wildly disconcerting and alien, none moreso than the opening sequence where a small boy casually eats pieces of a plastic garbage can.
Where the film stumbles is with the characters. The cast is great, but the roles are caricatures and grotesques, so divorced from normal humanity by construction that they're not especially compelling. The most human character is Scott Speedman's radical, Lang, a conundrum because his humanity is derived from embracing the inhumanity of others. Mortensen's Tenser is positioned as our lead, caught between the competing desires of multiple parties, and struggling to emotionally connect with any of them. He and Seydoux are constantly trading technobabble about surgeries and biological mutations in the most muted, unaffected tones. I get that the intention here is to show that the absence of pain and suffering has rendered humans less able to access positive experiences, but it does make it more difficult to be invested in any of the characters' fates. "Crimes of the Future" is fascinating for its ideas and aesthetics, but rarely moving.
Now on to "Flux Gourmet," which is about a collective of performance artists who have won a prestigious residence with The Sonic Catering Institute. This involves Billy (Asa Butterfield), Lamina (Ariane Labed), and Elle (Fatma Mohamed) creating performances through cooking, processing, and manipulating food. They blend, they chop, they create skits about the agony of going to shopping markets, all with a special focus on the sounds being produced by their efforts. Their experience is being recorded by a man named Stones (Makis Papadimitriou), an outsider who is experiencing gastric issues, resulting in embarrassing bodily functions. Overseeing all of them is the Institute's leader, Jan Stevens (Gwendoline Christie), who is always fabulously dressed and not shy about voicing her opinions on the artists' work.
Most of Strickland's films up to this point have been horror and suspense pieces. Here, while there are still anxious tinges of dread, "Flux Gourmet" leans more toward satire and comedy. Once you get past the lovingly orchestrated performance art ASMR, the absurdity really comes through. The collective is a mess of constant drama. Jan and Elle have clashing visions. Elle is abusive toward Lamia and Billy. Billy and Jan end up in bed together, though Billy is suspicious of Jan's motives. Tensions rise, the performances become more extreme, and poor Stones just wants his poor stomach to leave him alone. Everything is played straight, especially when it comes to the dizzying heights of sonic catering arts. Jan and Elle nearly come to blows over a flanger being used in the performance. A major sequence involves the threat of coprophagia.
The trouble is, if this is supposed to be taken as satire, it's not especially insightful or interesting satire. The culinary collective is a pretty dire group of wannabes and pretentious auteurs who backstab each other at every opportunity and let their pretentiousness run amok in predictable ways. Stones is supposed to become enamored with and eventually join their ranks, but I don't think Strickland makes a good case as to why. "Flux Gourmet" offers the occasional good visual gag and deadpan line reading from some committed actors, but otherwise spends too much time wallowing in its own indulgence.
---
No comments:
Post a Comment