Saul has parlayed his life—or at least his biology—into his life’s work. He is a performance artist who allows the removal of his rogue organs to be performed live, courtesy of Caprice (Léa Seydoux), a former trauma surgeon who also qualifies as Saul’s intimate partner, at least in a world where, as Timlin says, “surgery is the new sex.” You might say he’s an instinctive artist, and the question of how much will he has over his creations might be a sticking point for critics. “I never really know when I’m working on something new,” he remarks, apropos of whatever random appendage his cells are generating at the moment. And as in art, knowing the boundaries of transgression is important. A strange figure named Lang (Scott Speedman) approaches Saul and proposes a performance that may not be strictly legal.
Indeed, “Crimes of the Future” may be the closest that Cronenberg has come to making a pure film noir. The various alliances and double-crosses are complicated enough for “The Big Sleep,” government conspiracies are hiding in plain sight, and the police are cracking down on what they call “new vice,” their name for evolutionary mutinies. Yet for all its mysteries and labyrinthine plot, “Crimes of the Future” is an oddly poignant film about not resisting what the future brings—criminal, unknown, or otherwise.
“De Humani Corporis Fabrica,” showing in Directors’ Fortnight, does for the eye, the brain, the spine, and the prostate what Castaing-Taylor and Paravel’s “Leviathan” (2012) did for working parts of a Massachusetts fishing trawler: home in on them at extremely close range, to the point where even the most familiar and intimate sights become strange and terrifying. The surface of the eye becomes the stuff of solar flares. Tumor cells on slides begin to look abstract expressionist.
The filmmakers, experimental documentarians whose work is part art and part science, filmed in eight French hospitals using a variety of medical and nonmedical cameras, with the bulk of the shooting, according to Castaing-Taylor in the press kit, occurring with a specially designed lipstick-size camera that fell somewhere in between. The human body is the subject of art in other regards. Who is to say that medicine can’t be one of them?