Cronenberg tackles grief -- in his way

 -- A blind date in a trendy restaurant hardly seems odd, until you realize the restaurant sits in the middle of a  cemetery.

--  In the same cemetery, tombstones are equipped with video screens that allow relatives to observe the deteriorating bodies of their loved ones.

   You probably won't be surprised to learn that The Shrouds -- the movie in which this cemetery serves as a major backdrop -- was directed by David Cronenberg. 

   Cronenberg made his feature debut in 1970 with Crimes of the Future, a title he used again for an entirely different movie in 2022. 

  Known for movies such as Eastern Promises, Spider, A History of Violence, Naked Lunch, The Fly, Videodrome, and Scanners, Cronenberg has become a  recognized master of body horror, an artist who transforms ordinary realities into dreamscapes rich with bizarre possibilities.

   I was late seeing Cronenberg's second Crimes of the Future. I never reviewed the movie but reacted negatively to a work in which Viggo Mortensen played a performance artist whose body grew strange new organs that became part of an art exhibit. 

   In The Shrouds, Cronenberg employs three principal actors for a chilly exploration in which grief and technology make strained connections. 

    Vincent Cassel plays Karsh, an entrepreneur who owns a cemetery that boasts his technological innovations.  Karsh, we learn, abandoned his career making industrial videos, opening the cemetery after his wife died of cancer. He couldn't bear to part with her. Ergo, the cemetery where he could visit her corpse by using an app that, on command, peeked into the high-tech shroud that encased her decomposing body.

  Diane Kruger does triple duty as Karsh's wife (seen in flashbacks), as his sister-in-law Terry, and as the voice of Hunny, the Avatar who serves as Karsh’s secretary.

  A disheveled-looking Guy Pierce turns up as Maury, Karsh's tech-savvy brother-in-law; he helped design the movie's futuristic cemetery.

   Oh yeah, I forgot Sandrine Holt, who plays Son-Min, the cucumber-cool wife of a dying Hungarian industrialist who wants Karsh to open one of his signature graveyards in Budapest.

   If you've ever seen Cronenberg, you can't help but notice how much Cassel has been made to look like the director whose wife died in 2017. Similarities aside, Cronenberg doesn't deserve to have his film seen only through a personal lens, even if the movie began -- as he has said -- with his reaction to his wife's death.

    Both Kruger and Pierce bring energy to their roles. Cassel, on the other hand, creates a character whose subdued demeanor plays against an inner life mired in grief and obsession.

     As I watched The Shrouds, I weighed what I was seeing against horror notions about the body. Forget the soul, we’re nothing but accumulated flesh, bone, and blood -- or so the argument goes.

     When Karsh says he misses his wife's body, it's as if he's saying that her physicality encompassed the totality of her being, thought and emotions included. Don't take this as a sexist expression: In the body-horror canon, men are subject to the same existential condition. 

      All of this has a sexual component: Mired in desire, the body craves other bodies, and gives their loss the force of an addiction that can't be shaken.

     Of course, The Shrouds can't entirely be measured by any theory, partly because the movie extends a variety of other thematic tentacles: paranoia-inducing political theories, issues involving ecology and techno-tyranny (Karsh sometimes puts his Tesla into self-driving mode), and social taboos: A sexual scene between Karsh and Terry, his late wife's sister, brims with libidinal hunger.

     All of this begins when Karsh's high-tech graveyard is vandalized. The mystery behind the vandalization runs throughout the movie, but generates little intrigue, and a mostly chilly tone can make it difficult to tell when Cronenberg is serious or mocking the genre in which he's working. Maybe both are happening simultaneously. In any case, feel free to laugh.

      You can sense the presence of a complex intelligence at work in The Shrouds, but the movie suggests more than it delivers.  Cronenberg plays with many ideas that don't seem fully imagined, and the movie's many tangents sometimes obscure the unbearable grief that puts Karsh into an emotional shroud he can't seem to escape. 

      Someday, I may look at The Shrouds again. For now, I take it as the faltering work of a director I admire. 

           

     

     

     

A surprisingly safe "Dangerous" movie

It features lots of interesting period-piece trappings, but David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method is an unsatisfying piece of work.

In David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method – an adaptation of a Christopher Hampton play called The Talking Cure – Michael Fassbender plays Carl Jung, Viggo Mortensen portrays Sigmund Freud and Keira Knightley takes on the role of Sabina Spielrein.

Jung and Freud presumably need no introduction; Spielrein on the other hand, may not be familiar to most audiences. She was a patient of Jung’s who went on to become an analyst of some repute and who also was one of Jung’s mistresses – at least according to Cronenberg’s talky period piece.

Try as I might, I seldom got past the sense that all three actors were playing characters rather than deeply inhabiting them, an impression that’s reinforced by the fact that Jung, Freud and Spielrein eventually become advocates for different – if overlapping – views of human behavior.

The screenplay, which was written by Hampton and based on a book by John Kerr, revolves around an interesting conflict, although the movie tends to make its clash of ideas seem less than urgent. I’ll risk a bit of reductionism to put it this way: Freud insisted that sex was at the core of human behavior. Jung believed there was more to humanity than sex; he affirmed what he saw as humanity’s inherently religious impulses.

A Dangerous Method might be the least Cronenberg-like of recent Cronenberg movies, a stylistically straightforward piece that sprinkles conversations (some vaguely interesting) over a variety of Swiss and Austrian locations, many shot by cinematographer Peter Suschitzky with tasteful rigor.

The movie’s sense of caution comes as a bit of a surprise because sex (and its importance) lies at the heart of the drama, as well as at the core of a growing conflict between Jung and Freud, who – for a time – thought Jung would inherit his mantle as head of the psychoanalytic movement.

Cronenberg fans needn't totally dismay; the movie is not without a bit of kinky behavior. As it turns out, Knightley’s Spielrein achieves her greatest sexual kicks by being spanked, a pleasure Jung obligingly provides, although he seems determined to show that he’s not having a good time doing it.

Jung seems to be torn between a conformist commitment to his marriage (perhaps made easier by the fact that his wife was wealthy) and the unleashing of his more libidinous drives.

Although I had difficulty totally buying either Fassbender or Mortensen, neither has the annoying impact of Knightley, who enters the picture screaming as she’s being carried into Jung’s hospital in Zurich. In portraying Spielrein’s hysteria, Knightley juts out her jaw and contorts her facial muscles as if her body is being jolted by high-voltage shocks.

I don’t know if this is a “realistic’’ portrayal of severe hysteria, but I do know that in movie acting suggestion sometimes can be more powerful than demonstrative assertion. Put another way, Knightley’s performance may drive you a little crazy.

The story is not without political overlay: An increasingly concerned Freud fears that Jung’s interest in such matters as mysticism will undermine the scientific aura that's essential to the acceptance and growth of psychoanalysis.

These arguments too often make it seem as if the movie exists to articulate various points of view rather than to deeply probe the nature of its characters. At one point, though, Vincent Cassel shows up as Otto Gross, a brilliant psychoanalyst who believes all repression represents an unhealthy limitation of freedom. Cassel's welcome presence pushes the movie away from the neatly intellectualized debate between Freud and Jung.

Of the movie’s trio of principals, Mortensen probably provides the most interesting interpretation. His Freud has a deep and cagey sense of self-assurance – at least as it applies to the psychoanalytic domain over which he presides. A Dangerous Method, however, really has more to do with Jung than with Freud, who is absent from long stretches of the movie.

Maybe that’s why Mortensen’s performance wasn‘t enough to make me buy into A Dangerous Method, a movie that seems to unfold on a distant planet where talk about sex and dreams tends to become absurdly dispassionate. In the introduction to his book, Kerr talks about the ways in which Freud and Jung became the first thinkers to live with “that peculiarly intense burden of self-reflection that distinguishes the psychology of modern man.”

Maybe, but intense self-reflection isn’t necessarily the best place to begin a drama, and neither Cronenberg nor Hampton has been able entirely to liberate the material from the confines of the stage – other than by ensuring that the film’s conversations take place against a variety of elegant European backdrops.

In a time when the talking cure seems to have been supplanted by the dispensation of pills, the issues in A Dangerous Method don’t readily spring to life. They seem to swirl inside the embryonic and insular world of psychoanalysis, which – at least in this outing – provides no satisfying dramatic conclusion.