A few years ago when we first took a look through David Cronenberg‘s filmography, we we wrote that it had been a long journey to “respectability” for the eminent Canadian director. But that was just after a string of films (“A History of Violence,” “Eastern Promises” and “A Dangerous Method“) that suggested that Cronenberg had perhaps hung up his technophiliac/technophobic psych/body horror spurs for good, and that he was drifting into a more stately and accessible phase of his career. After only few prior dalliances with the mainstream, Cronenberg looked ready to settle down and go steady.
But while we’re pretty big fans of all three of those films, perhaps he sensed the definite undercurrent of dismay at that assessment last time. His two films since then — “Cosmopolis” and “Maps to the Stars” — may not signal any sort of a return to the clinical yet visceral unease of his early works, but nor are they in any real sense mainstream. Furthermore, they manage to be non-mainstream in very different ways: “Cosmopolis” is smooth and impenetrable and gun-metal gray; the star-studded ‘Maps’ is splashy, messy, grotesque and even (a first for the filmmaker) kind of self-consciously tacky. Perhaps the obvious thing for him to have done after that would have been to take on a prestige TV show. However, Cronenberg dodged the bullet of season 2 of “True Detective,” and for all that he’s an outspoken, often acerbic commentator on the industry and has in the past mooted sequels to “Eastern Promises” and “The Fly” and spoken at length about unmade what-ifs, his next project is really anyone’s guess. Not just in terms of title and provenance, but type: it could really be anything, in any genre, and how many 72 year-old directors can we say that about? Cronenberg continues to surprise, and to divide, and to zag just when we think he’ll predictably zig, and huge fans that we are, we wouldn’t have it any other way.
With the brilliant “The Brood” newly minted as the fifth (and almost certainly not final) Cronenberg title to be added to the Criterion Collection (after “Videodrome,” “Naked Lunch,” “Scanners” and “Dead Ringers“) here’s our assessment of Cronenberg’s ever-evolving, ever-mutating career.
“Stereo” (1969)
As with many film debuts from auteurs of long standing “Stereo” is probably of interest mainly to completists, and to fans anxious the trace the origin story behind one of the most original and idiosyncratic cinematic imaginations of our time. And on that level, it’s kind of heartening, because “Stereo,” while brimming with the same weird concerns and themes that mark some of the earliest and best of Cronenberg’s work, is no masterpiece — it’s clearly the work of a young man (Cronenberg was 26) learning filmmaking by doing. It’s a kind of short-movie concept stretched out to just-about-feature length (Cronenberg had two shorts under his belt before starting on it, and ‘Stereo’ is only 65 minutes long), the film is delivered as an educational/promotional video sponsored by a large plastics conglomerate and it shows the ever-cerebral filmmaker at his most emotionally removed. A black-and-white oddity, it centers on a nameless man (Ronald Mlodzik, a frequent early Cronenberg collaborator) who is brought to a compound to take part in a series of experiments wherein sexual activity is used to bolster telepathic abilities within polymorphous groups designed to replace the “outmoded” family unit model. Undone by a generally detached air, and by lengthy, choking narration (a factor of shooting without sync sound due to the noise of the camera), ‘Stereo’ (and arguably his next feature too) is most valuable today as a document of Cronenberg the student, the filmmaker-in-gestation, searching for, but not yet finding that perfect balance between kink, thought experiment and actual entertainment. [C]
“Crimes of the Future” (1970)
From the very same thematic and formal stable as “Stereo,” the 70-min “Crimes of the Feature” also stars Ronald Mlodzik and was also shot silently, with narration and various sound effects added after the fact. This time, however we get a dose of color, in the film stock if not necessarily in the script, a more overtly satirical tone and Mlodzik’s character gets a name (and how!): Adrian Tripod. Tripod is the director of a dermatological clinic sleazily named The House of Skin, but this clinic exists in an apocalyptic dystopia in which deadly cosmetics have killed off all sexually mature women. The remaining men try to adjust to this new reality in predictably Cronenbergian ways: sometimes they’re benign, as with those who get their fingernails painted as a dainty feminine embellishment; sometimes they’re grotesquely invasive, as with the man who parodies childbirth by growing extra modified organs in his body and having them removed. And sometimes, they’re disturbingly perverse as with the group of pedophiles holding a five-year-old girl hostage who try to encourage Tripod, searching for his old mentor, to mate with her. Oh, and these men also produce a weird foam that must be siphoned from their bodies, because there’s not enough freaky shit going on elsewhere. Honestly, in this and all other descriptions, “Crimes of the Future” sounds a whole lot more fascinating than it actually is: it’s a more interesting film to read/write about than to watch, which just goes to show how Cronenberg at this early stage was still closer to a kind of literary, idea-based storytelling, and had not yet mastered the filmmaking side of the equation. Ideas-wise, it’s a heady trip, but sitting through “Crimes of the Future” even with its slim running time, is a slog. [C]