Cosmopolis (David Cronenberg, 2012)

[colinr0380]

I want to throw in a last minute change to my end of year awards - the Citizens of Cosmopolis documentary on the UK Blu is fantastic, always entertaining and full of interesing insights and asides, even when running at 1 hour and 50 minutes (five minutes longer than the film itself!) That I think just beats out the Prometheus making of documentary for my best of the year recommendation.


Spoilers:

This was kind of fascinating - perhaps Cronenberg's coldest film since Crash. Colder really since while in Crash someone is being chosen and initiated into a secret society here the protagonist has conquered society and there is kind of nothing left for him to do. Rather than a person awakening to a way of re-asserting themselves it is about someone semi-consciously using the elements around them to engineer their own destruction, much as he must have engineered his own success before the film starts.

Instead of really being a capitalist critique it seems more about Eric being used throughout the film by everyone in his life. There is a kind of move throughout the film. At first characters are seeming to act totally independently of Eric - he doesn't really need to be there anymore and his business qualities are constantly talked of as being a part of his past (instead, for all the discussions about being on top of information and the importance of nano-seconds, there is amusingly a lot of urgent chatter without Eric actually doing anything!). Then we move through employees to the central figure of the vaguely-needed wife, with the half-hearted courtship coming after the marriage and perhaps getting to know each other being the element that has ruined it! Or the dead rapper with the friend feeling the need to apologise because he hadn't the courtesy to die in the 'proper' manner.

After that we finally get to the characters who need Eric to define themselves - the bodyguard, the protestors and the assassins of both pie and gun variety. Rather than asserting himself Eric seems to actually be asking to be used - to be destroyed because it doesn't mean the same thing if he does it himself, from begging for the taser gun to wanting another gun to be used on him (after giving himself a mock-stigmata).

I like the idea that Grand Illusion brought up of Eric 'shedding his capital' throughout the film, although I'm not sure that he really cares about the capital one way or another, although everyone around him does and defines him by it as a symbol or figurehead. This is the aspect of the film that I have trouble with as Eric is portrayed as still questioning and slightly sympathetic during the film, even if he commits some terrible actions and doesn't seem to have any social skills. He doesn't really have any role available to him. The film seems to suggest that he is not totally irredeemable, seemingly mostly due to his young age, and my real problem with the film is being asked to in some ways sympathise with the troubles of an unrepentant capitalist when really I don't care!

And that sympathy or idea of him rejecting capitalism gets complicated by his angry reaction to the pie assassin (i.e. kicking him in the balls!) followed by killing his bodyguard for his failure to protect him.

Eric isn't really sympathetic, but feels like the main character simply through being portrayed as just slightly more complex than the one-note ciphers surrounding him. While the film admirably doesn't push this, it would be easy enough to think of this as a 'Fight Club/Identity' film, with everyone projections of Eric's thought processes, appearing and disappearing from his life as and when they are needed (even the black basketball players in the night court who are conveniently there to pin a murder onto!). Which means that even if the back projection exteriors were not meant to be heightened or fake-looking, they still work that way!

That theatricality of the film perhaps ties in with the amusing Rothko Chapel moment earlier on where Eric talks about having space for it, yet spends all of his time in his limo or public and crowded spaces, as if afraid of wide open, empty spaces where he might be left on his own. He wants to be separate yet surrounded; apart yet connected; married yet single.

I particularly liked the Mathieu Almaric pie-assassin scene for its creation of a beautiful theatrical space for that particular character to perform in (in a sense though the other characters have been performing too as they move from seat to seat in the limo, all except for Samantha Morton's character, who briefly usurps Eric's 'throne' for her scene). Even when the film leaves the limo for that scene the street still feels like a stage set with the French chap bounding from one edge of the frame to the other with the photo-flashing photographers demarcating the boundaries. It is getting slightly into Peter Greenaway territory there, I think.

It also anticipates the discreet settings of the barber shop and real assassins apartment later on too, along with the way that the pie assassin has factored in getting beaten up into his plan. In fact his plan wouldn't work if his pie in the face attack wasn't met with a more extreme, sympathy-engendering response.

That all plays into that final scene where Eric might be the answer to the assassin's problems but he is also using him too, uncaring about what allowing the assassin to kill him will do to the assassin's life. Unthinking and uncaring, just using people for what they can offer you in the short term and then disposing of them.

This is quite a difficult, brutally empty and utterly cold film based on mutual need and degredation (this is the film that the Daily Mail should have been protesting about for suggesting the collapse of Western civilisation). I'm not sure that I like it at all. But it is a film I'm looking forward to seeing a few more times to get my thoughts in a better order on it.

[R0lf]

I think the film is more questioning social (white) entitlement and where this leads us.

Entitlement is an important social question to ask because once people move beyond being purely survivalist where do we go? How do we improve ourselves? What becomes our new goal?

None of the characters in this movie are actually vulnerable. Even the protesters and the down and out are insulated and protected socially. This is why I think audiences have had a hard time with this movie - it is basically about entitled (mostly white) people complaining and the audience (rightly?) feels they should get over themselves.

This complaining is important though because as humans we really should at some stage want to move beyond base survivalism as our core social instinct. The (deliberate) vacuity and childishness of the people in this movie is more representative of society trying to improve itself but not knowing how. It is taking baby steps to find value in humans beyond simply surviving.

[McCrutchy]

I've just ordered the US BD of this, as I missed it in the cinema--I can't seem to get myself out to NYC these days, and I really have to change that--and I can see from a back cover that, besides the feature-length documentary and cast interviews that are on the UK BD, the US disc also has an audio commentary by Cronenberg. For $14.99 on Amazon right now, this is probably a steal for any Cronenberg fan even if you don't like the film.

[rohming]

i am a huge, huge fan of Cronenberg and i have to say that i pretty much hated this. but i sorta knew i would cuz i hated the book and knew that Cronenberg was gonna stick to it pretty close. just way too many of the aesthetic and performance decisions i found distracting, annoying, or jarring, i was never immersed in the thing, i was constantly aggravated by the incessant dialogue and monologues (sorry, just not a DeLillo fan), it was too blatantly trying to be provocative on it surface and while my thought was provoked to some degree by various elements in the film i never found those thoughts coming together or progressing into anything coherent or interesting or even a little bit insightful. much preferred A Dangerous Method, which i also watched recently and consider to be something like Cronenberg's own Age of Innocence. oh, also, i hope Pattinson isn't Cronenberg's new Viggo because i thought he was pretty awful (though maybe i should blame the character more than the actor, i dunno).

[colinr0380]

After watching it again, I'm going to have another go at a review of this:

A fascinating, difficult, almost clinically cold film (colder even than Crash where at least a mutually fascinating hobby tied the network together!) with the emotions burning away under the surface, inexpressable and maybe misunderstood by those having them. The 'blank' canvasses of the Rothko paintings fit into this too, and it is almost a film that uses a thousand words to try and express one Rothko picture. Or perhaps to only express the hard division between the blocks of colour in a Rothko painting.

I liked the dialogue in this picture, structured into monologues directed 'at' people rather than real conversations - people stuck in their own worlds, conversing but separate and unreachable. Our lead referring to himself with the Royal "We", making personal assumptions that unthinkingly include everybody around him in his own personal power fantasy. And everyone around him is detached whilst colluding, or collaborating, too.

Much like American Psycho, this is also a film about the thrusting world of business that is so desperately predicated on the universal moment-to-moment present of acquisition without a thought to the future (Samantha Morton) or the past (Juliette Binoche). The promise to pay in the future isn't a real promise, much as the promise of sex at some future point, rather than right now at this minute, isn't really any sort of deal that our hero can accept from his new (trophy?) wife. And like American Psycho, it deals with the emptiness of work by showing everyone working extremely hard at doing nothing at all, producing nothing but hot air (and well toned but asexual machine-tooled bodies with all of the robotic exercise regimes they engage in).

And most damningly the film tackles the obsessive grasp of information allowing someone to feel in total control of everything around them, yet that only increasing the paranoia and fear that there is something they are not aware of that would upend everything. Seeing patterns to control while not grasping the messiness of nature and of life (the film makes an interesting companion piece to Darren Aronofsky's Pi in that sense). Of observing everything but understanding nothing. Of not valuing the serendipitous or the strange or misshapen, or the mutated as having value in its own right, and providing an alternative branch of life that might lead somewhere new, not to the inevitability of an economic collapse and collective death wish.

Everyone in the film, rich or poor, seems to have not grasped that idea yet, still looking for the quick fix of someone that they can define themselves against to make themselves look better, or more hardworking, or make their name in some way. Trying to sell their souls, or make their pitch, to disinterested bidders who only have Messiah complexes on their minds.