Crimes of the Future

Crimes of the Future is, like its predecessor Stereo, an early example of director David Cronenberg's eccentric vision. Made as student films on extremely small budgets, both films betray their economical origins at every point. Unlike Stereo, Crimes is in color rather than black and white, but it shares the earlier film's minimalist aesthetic. Shot silent, the soundtrack consists entirely of a measured, stilted voiceover which appears only at intervals to tell the film's story, interspersed with noisy, crackling industrial soundscapes. The film is abstracted, its narrative willfully obtuse and elliptical. It is set in an unsettling future world in which a mysterious and incurable plague has wiped out most of the adult women, and now seems to be spreading to the men as well. The plague is, as bodily transformations and deformations so often are for Cronenberg, both disturbing and fascinating for its victims: the patients emit strange white (semen-like) foam from their orifices and bleed thick black fluid from their eyes and mouths. These discharges are, for some strange reason, almost irresistibly attractive; anyone who comes across these fluids is seized with an urge to touch them, to smear them across their hands, and to taste them, sensually licking the disease's syrupy discharges from their fingers.

It's apparent that Cronenberg's signature obsessions are almost completely intact even in this early student effort: his conflation of the gross and the sublime; his treatment of abnormal sexuality as both frightening and hypnotically erotic; his fascination with the creation of new worlds, new ways of living, through biological transformations. The world of this film is truly an alien world, a fact that Cronenberg communicates through the strange, slow-moving quality of the narrative, as well as the surreal, nonsensical actions that his characters perform, often with a ritualistic air that only increases further the feeling of something being, somehow, off. The story ostensibly centers around a certain Adrian Tripod (the gaunt, ghostly pale Ronald Mlodzik), a researcher of some kind who wanders from one obscure job to another: the head of a strange dermatological facility called the House of Skin; an observer at an STD clinic where a man has been infected with a disease that causes him to sprout countless bizarre, functionally useless new internal organs, a phenomenon his doctors have deemed a "creative cancer;" a courier whose sole function seems to be ferrying clear plastic bags of socks and underwear back and forth between silent men who solemnly arrange the garments into piles based on obscure criteria.

Tripod, who delivers the film's oddly hesitant voiceover, is less a proper character than a focal point for the weirdness of Cronenberg's images. There's no explanation for the narrator's sudden switches of jobs, nor his decision to fall in with a group of "subversive" pedophiles in the film's final act. It's telling that over the course of the film, his narration changes from the first person to the third person; by the end, he's referring to himself by his full name every time he speaks. Despite his severe appearance, with his pale eggplant-shaped head hovering above his all-black outfits, Tripod's interactions with the many people he meets tend to be sensual, bizarrely erotic. While serving as some kind of foot therapist, Tripod treats a young man who leers at the researcher while Tripod strips off the man's boot and sock and begins caressing and massaging his foot, finally pressing it against his forehead and beginning to vibrate as though electrified. Cronenberg shoots this scene like a homosexual seduction, with the young man reclining back, a knowing smile on his lips, his legs slightly spread, with Tripod kneeling between the other man's outstretched feet.


There's something unsettling about the way Cronenberg deploys gay and feminine iconography here, as markers of strangeness: the recurring image of brightly painted toe- and fingernails, the sensuous embraces between men in a world mostly devoid of women, the way Tripod kisses the cheeks of a dead patient in order to drink up the dried blood that poured out of the corpse's mouth. The film's vision of sexuality is immensely disturbing, and never more so than in the final scenes, when Tripod and his new pedophile allies kidnap a prepubescent girl. Tripod's voiceover calmly discusses the necessity of trying to "impregnate" this girl, who's treated as a test subject, and the scene where Tripod begins stripping while the girl watches, coloring pictures on the floor, is unbelievably creepy and queasy. Cronenberg is walking a tight rope here, verging on exploitation, especially when he cuts to reverse shot closeups of the girl in frankly seductive poses, her fingers twirling through her hair. There's just something icky about the whole thing, something more disturbed than disturbing. One watches a scene like this and is unsettled more by the implications for what went on during filming than by what might happen in the fictional scenario. The scene inevitably triggers unpleasant thoughts of Cronenberg directing this girl to pose in these ways, arranging her gestures and posture to suggest things she couldn't possibly understand herself; it's exploitative and more than a little uncomfortable to watch, in ways entirely different from the discomfort so often generated by Cronenberg's later work.

Even if one ignores, for the moment, the ethical implications of these scenes, Crimes of the Future can't really be called a successful film. It's sporadically interesting for its glimpse into Cronenberg's developing themes and ideas, but it's also often dull and soporific. The film is characterized by long, meandering, near-silent scenes that are often never explained, never developed into a part of a coherent story. There's a dream logic to the film's narrative structure, which switches without warning from one mostly self-contained vignette to the next, and this can be effective at times, producing the odd, hallucinatory quality of the film's most striking images and moments. More often, though, there are long stretches of utter boredom, like the seemingly endless scenes of sock-folding and sorting. The film is undeniably intriguing, and is clearly the foundation for Cronenberg's later work, a laboratory in which he could experiment and develop his unique cinematic obsessions. As a whole, though, it's a flawed and disturbing work best seen as a curiosity of the director's early career.

La rupture

The title of Claude Chabrol's La rupture is a wonderfully slippery phrase for a wonderfully slippery movie. It refers, or seems to refer, to an incident that occurs, with shocking, sudden violence, within the first minute of the film. The struggling writer Charles (Jean-Claude Drouot), son of a rich bourgeoisie family, wakes up one morning, walks into the kitchen, and without saying a single word, brutally assaults his wife Hélène (Stéphane Audran) and their son, until Hélène finally manages to subdue him with a frying pan. As is typical of Chabrol, this scene sets the tone of the film right from the start. The first few moments of the film are quiet and peaceful, with Hélène cheerfully preparing for her day and feeding her son. The attack itself, coming so suddenly with virtually no set-up, is thus doubly startling and disorienting, creating a stark rupture in the fabric of the placid domesticity that existed before Charles — shirtless, hulking, wild-eyed — emerged from his room. This incident of violence, so frightening and abrupt, is the film's first sign of fault lines.

This attack does indeed hang over the rest of the film, and yet it is not the only rupture that occurs in the course of the film. The title could just as easily refer to Chabrol's aesthetic approach to this narrative of domestic fracturing, which might be described as a system of tiny ruptures in the narrative continuity and the cinematic conventions. Chabrol's characteristic editing can only be described as abrupt, jarring, even disorienting at times. His choices in editing and camera movement never fail to call attention to themselves, but they do so in ways that also subvert the usual psychoanalytical readings of camera movement and film techniques. His choices in constructing his film rarely reveal the emotional tenor of the scene, nor are they meant to suggest anything about the interior states of his characters, which are usually only as apparent as the characters themselves wish to make them. Rather, his editing in particular often seems to be governed by a utilitarian philosophy that has little patience for the niceties of continuity and spatial laws. Chabrol cuts directly from an interior shot in which Hélène says, "We'll take the tram," to a point-of-view shot out the front window of said tram, directed downwards at the rails speeding by below. Likewise, no sooner does Hélène say she is going to see her injured son than, in the very next shot, she is standing beside his bed, already in mid-motion as she leans down towards him. Such direct, sudden cuts frequently move Chabrol's characters from place to place, so much so that on the very rare occasion when he uses a dissolve to indicate a passage of time or place, it seems inappropriate, a lapse into a much more conventional cinematic vocabulary.

The film's other crucial "rupture" is in terms of point of view, which remains puzzlingly ambiguous throughout the film. Hélène is undoubtedly the story's protagonist at the outset, reacting to this brutal assault and to the remarkably hostile reaction that she receives from those around her, who seem to blame her for the events and for hurting her husband, rather than the other way around. But at some point, Chabrol subtly, sneakily diverts the audience's attention from this besieged woman, shifting the film's point of view onto Paul (Jean-Pierre Cassel), the shady character who's hired by Charles' rich father Régnier (Michel Bouquet) to discredit Hélène. At this point, the film becomes something of a low-key thriller, as Paul attempts to gather evidence to paint the saintly Hélène as a whore, a drunk, a drug addict, a child molester: anything in order to make her appear unfit to take care of her son. Chabrol completes this shift in perspective so smoothly, so quietly, that one barely even realizes at first that Hélène has been shuffled into the background, while Paul has taken over the place of the protagonist.

The audience is thus placed in a strange relationship with respect to Paul. He's a detestable character in so many ways, and furthermore attempting to smear and ruin a thoroughly good and sympathetic woman. And yet Chabrol realizes the sway that a strong central protagonist can have over audiences, with a potential to redeem or at least complicate the reception of even the sleaziest anti-hero. He allows Paul's charming and warm outward manner to seduce the audience even as it earns him the trust of Hélène herself. Nor is Paul entirely unsympathetic. In fact, he is a dark mirror of Hélène in terms of the film's emphasis on economics and class divisions. He is, like her, struggling on the edges of poverty, doing whatever it takes to make ends meet. Just as she once worked, briefly, as a stripper and now serves as a barmaid — both careers that automatically lowered her in the eyes of Charles' class-conscious parents — Paul is irrevocably lower class. Furthermore, there's a strong suggestion that Paul was himself a victim of the ruthless business practices of Régnier; his promised reward for his dirty work will be a well-paid managerial job, a chance to return to the rich man's business empire. Paul is placed in the kind of position that would normally be reserved for the hero of a spy thriller. The focus is on him, not Hélène, as he attempts to weave the traps and complicated plans that will undo her. It seems inevitable that he will succeed, that his schemes will go off without a hitch, just as they always do for the master spy trying to outwit his nemesis.


At this point, with Paul seemingly in complete control and ready to spring his devious trap, the film switches, in its final act, back to a point of view more closely aligned with Hélène, the original and true protagonist. Chabrol's feat here is to construct a series of illusions that are designed to fall apart completely once the point of view returns to Hélène. There's one last wonderful sequence, after Hélène coolly rejects Paul's dim-witted attempts to rope her into his convoluted scheme, when the crestfallen henchman scurries around, desperately trying to straighten up after the mess he's made, literally cramming the evidence of his endeavors into his closet. It's a complete deconstruction of the film's secondary protagonist, this slimy man who briefly seemed to be deviously clever but is revealed as insufficient to the task in the face of Hélène's calm, reserved goodness. It's also a gleeful subversion of the conventional thriller plotline, in which the hero or heroine is inevitably forced to do absolutely illogical things in order to comply with the dictates of the screenwriter. This film's heroine, refreshingly, reacts with intelligence and rightful suspicion, thereby completely disintegrating Paul's laughably absurd plot, which might itself have been scripted by a Hollywood genre scribe.

Paul's plot fails, then, because he is relying on a Hollywood-stupid adversary, but also because his deceitful evil can ultimately not measure up to the good in the world, and in Hélène. This goodness radiates from her throughout the film, as Audran delivers a stunning, restrained performance. This woman represents one half of the film's dissection of that essential myth of femininity, the Madonna/whore complex. She is a saintly creature, unshaken by tragedy, always ready to face each challenge with her seemingly unlimited reserves of strength. As she says towards the end of the film, spitting it like a curse at the increasingly unraveling Paul, "I am tired, but I still have my strength." It's a fitting line for a woman who is the embodiment of perseverance and constancy, an eternal mother figure willing to do anything to protect her child. If Hélène is the film's Madonna, its whore is undoubtedly Paul's girlfriend Emilie (Marguerite Cassan), a creature of such pure, unfiltered sexuality that she is naked or nearly naked in virtually every scene in which she appears. She is continually throwing herself at the disinterested Paul, who more and more seems simply bored with her unfettered sensuality, and perversely attracted to the untainted Hélène. Emilie is woman stripped, quite literally, of everything but a raw sexual drive. At one point, when Paul asks her what she's thinking, she simply smiles lasciviously, prompting his reply: "That's all you ever think about."

These are, of course, the two poles of conventional media representation for women, and Chabrol navigates the film's proto-feminist sentiments in typically interesting ways, drawing out the complexity and strength of Hélène's vision of womanhood. In fact, far from being the simplified "Madonna" figure, she is a fully fleshed-out woman, capable of great strength, great independence, mothering instincts, and even remarkable passion, as we finally see towards the film's end as the depth of her feelings for Charles are revealed in a scene of pure melodrama. Society is all too willing to slap a much simpler label on Hélène, tagging her as a whore for her past as a stripper or for her pending divorce. Society would much rather she was as easy to identify and classify as Emilie, who in fact is a pure cartoon, a hollowed-out male fantasy projection. The film's opposition of these two "types" is thus, not only a Madonna/whore dichotomy, but a contrast between a "real" woman, with all her attendant complexity, and a purely fictional construction intended to elicit sexual urges and nothing more. It's no coincidence that Paul's apartment, in addition to housing the perpetually naked Emilie, is papered with photos clipped from porno magazines; Emilie originates from the same source.

If the film mostly focuses on these central conflicts, particularly the tense and antagonistic relationship between Paul and Hélène, there is also a lot going on in the margins as well. Chabrol has crammed the film with a weird, quirky supporting cast, ranging from a morally censorious landlady (Annie Cordy) to a hammy actor with a much more expansive, humanistic view of morality (Mario David) to the trio of gossipy old women who, like a Greek chorus, comment on the action and come to life as avenging harpies or guardian angels in the film's hallucinogenic final section. La rupture is an unsettling masterpiece for Chabrol, a film that's at times shocking, at times darkly funny — especially during a ludicrous but satisfying denouement that needs to be seen to be believed — and always piercing in its satirical insights about class, gender, economics, and relationships.