Cosmopolis, hypnotic, cryptic and demanding. Also the more pedantic Cronenberg film. A challenge for adventurous palates moviegoers.
In Cosmopolis, David Cronenberg is a double harakiri. The first is of a commercial nature. A calculated risk. Has signed starring Robert Pattinson, actor popular for his work in the Twilight series that probably will drag the followers and supporters of it contributing positively to the collection of the first weekend of the film. But once inside the theater the approach is so distant and alien to the teen vampire saga that can be catastrophic among fans of the actor. It should be noted therefore that Cosmopolis is the opposite of Twilight. It must be said that Robert Pattinson plays most difficult of his career so far and convinces in this very complex work that should raise a twist to his career and definitely get off the teen idol tag. But you can put together a mess when teenage Twilight fans match the movie fans of David Cronenberg and the readers of Don DeLillo, author of the novel on which the film is based. Sparks can because they are two totally different audiences. And I’m convinced that David Cronenberg, a director who has given most provocative films in the last three decades, much amused by the situation.
The second harakiri Cronenberg practiced in this film has to do more with their own approach to devising the same without making any concessions to the viewer. At first glance, gives the minimum Cosmopolis film with maximum dialogue, which inevitably results in an unnecessarily pedantic exercise. The film must be film and preserve and impose their own criteria and nature when adapting a work from another medium. However, Cronenberg leans prestige in this film speak on any other elements and the result, plus highly theatrical, is a punch to the jaw of the patience of the viewer.
Cronenberg has been put on display one of those movies with hypnotic qualities that do not catch all kinds of viewers but manage to pick up their networks to a kind of spectator willing to live vocationally film as an intellectual rather than visceral experience. Even when addressing genre films, Cronenberg has always throw challenges the viewer to force him to make a trip more rich and interesting film than one would expect at first. Movies like Rabid, Shivers, Scanners, Videodrome and Dead Ringers are good examples. Cosmopolis belongs to his most unclassifiable movies collection and stimulants such as Naked Lunch, Crash and Spider. But in my opinion it lacks the visual nerve of them all. In Cosmopolis provocation capacity of these films has been replaced by a pedantic exercise highbrow cutting in which the director and the film seems to have caught the cold and autism your main character.
Leaving the press pass, I commented to a colleague that had seemed pedantic. And he replied, with great judgment, «Cronenberg has always been very pedantic». Right. It’s pedantic, but we conquered from provocation and nonsense, revealing the darkest of human nature. This is from the darker truth of our nature.
In Cosmopolis such pedantry is not offset by the truth that had Naked Lunch, Crash and Spider. And the truth is in my opinion the essential key art. The only character who has some nerve and some truth is the murderer of the cakes, which itself deserves a movie more than the total cretin we have to share the whole story.
As for sex and flesh, two essential condiments of the pedantic narrative structures of Cronenberg to conquer in the past, neither convinces Cosmopolis. In this film the sex is absent and against all odds no nearer to the action, but it takes us away. Sex loses carnal quality, healthy sweat perverse and shared by lovers who became revolutionary and provocative gesture in other director’s films. I assume it is a choice to define itself Cronenberg your main character, but there is a scene Cronenberg hundred percent that goes to show that even the director is asking and needing something more than life in his film: exploring prostate and bottle squeezed between the legs of the collaborator is a scene of sexual liberation. Similarly, the other one hundred percent Cronenberg scene of the film, the attack on the guest on the television program, is a release of another essential tool in Cronenberg’s films: violence .
I understand that the director is choosing to opt for that distance and that coldness, that autism defined by isolation of the protagonist suicide, but I think the parade has killed highbrow truth that could have led to a much more complete picture, vivid and interesting . Cosmopolis is an interesting journey for adventurous moviegoers and forged in the difficult challenge of the films, but from another perspective can be torture less delicious than other pedants to those before us this talented director, one of the best in the history of cinema.
Although the protagonist is a jerk isolated hypochondriac and autistic tendencies, let all this spreading to the movie itself seems like a bad choice.
What works well in literature may not necessarily work well in cinema. And cinema is the realm of the image, not the kingdom of the word.
Miguel Juan Payán
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