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Instead of masking the upheavals of humanity, cosmetics propel its devastation—an analytical joke from David Cronenberg, who already has the sinister deadpan to tell it. Scarcity of females is the New Order's problem, hippies are next as bodies ooze a foamy fluid, curiously flavorful and "even sensually attractive." No lab coats but black leather for Dr. Tripod (Ronald Mlodzik), on the case from The House of Skin to the Institute of Neo-Venereal Diseases and beyond. Organs in multicolored jars for one patient ("His body is a galaxy. These creatures are solar systems"), webbed toes on the way to becoming flippers for another. A leisurely stroll across the University of Toronto on a nippy afternoon, interrupted by a turtlenecked cannibal who pops back into the frame to spit a chunk of meat at the scientist. Mutated nostrils and pedophilic coteries, glowing slats and silhouettes at the Metaphysical Import/Export observatory, a design rather close to Allen's Sleeper. A few rungs up and down the evolutionary ladder, as Albee would have it, not quite enough to fill up the engulfing negative space of cavernous corridors. Boiling coffee pots, stuttering birds and sonar pings on the soundtrack, plus the protagonist's neurasthenic musings, all part of the dissonant documentation of modernist Canada ca. 1970. Against "a morbid stasis" (cf. Godard's Le Gai Savoir), the Cronenberg theorem: "A new form of sexuality for a new species of man." End or beginning of the world boils down to Lolita in the bare hotel room, "una furtiva lagrima..." With Jon Lidolt, Tania Zolty, Paul Mulholland, and Jack Messinger.
--- Fernando F. Croce |