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Legend has it that the goddess Demeter became so angry with

Ereshicton

, the proud and sacrilegious king of Thessaly, that she ordered Limos (hunger) to be punished exemplarily.

He first sold his fortune, then his father's, then his entire kingdom, and finally became a beggar, feeding ravenously on the filth he found.

There was no way to sate.

And so on until he decided to eat himself;

he self-cannabalized.

Problem solved.

Cannes is almost a goddess and her power to starve her favorite directors is immeasurable.

David Cronenberg

is one of them, maybe (just maybe) not as arrogant as Ereshicton, but enough to be hungry for that Palme d'Or that is denied to him year after year.

He was the Jury Prize with '

Crash

'in 1996, but hunger does not stop.

And so it came to this year of the

75th anniversary

as the most anticipated.

'Crimes of the future'

is his return to the cinema after eight years.

It is, as is the law in his filmography, an essentially sacrilegious film.

It stars his latest fetish actor,

Viggo Mortensen,

accompanied by

Léa Seydoux

(a French institution) and

Kristen Stewart

(the last and youngest of the great icons).

A story of transhumanism is told, of bodies that transform and mutate, of flesh that opens up to new existential territories and of spaces rusted by the most serious of loneliness.

You don't need to see more than a tiny fragment of a single frame to make it clear that it's Cronenberg;

a Cronenberg willing to sacrifice himself and eat himself if necessary in order to satisfy a hunger that is above all punishment from the gods.

And from Cannes.

Léa Seydoux and Viggo Mortensen in a moment from 'Crimes of the future'. CANNES

'Crimes of the future'

continues breathlessly and with almost biblical fidelity much of the ideology of the most identifiable Cronenberg (we won't say classic).

Not surprisingly, the script was written in 1999;

that is to say, when he premiered '

eXistenZ

', a fable of metabodies on one side and the other of reality.

In that film, the characters were organically incorporated into games that ran through parallel universes.

Now everything is resolved in the possibility of human evolution towards a new body with new organs with new sexualities

and with the true possibility of making food from one's own waste in general and from plastics in particular.

Like Ereshicton happened to him before he self-cannibalized.

The film once again demonstrates the director's ability to turn anonymous settings into the stamp of the Apocalypse itself.

The dialogues flow like the music itself, pending to electrify every inch of the screen.

It is provocation, but without scandal, always from the awareness of each of the limits.

It is a parable, but only pending of itself, without playing the sobering morals.

And then there is surgery as the new sex.

The epidermis opens with elegance and in the same way that the characters of '

Crash

' fell in love with scars, those of

'Crimes of the future'

they exhibit their lust from the depths of the flesh.

Don't worry, everything is under control.

What the director said about fainting at least by projection was part of the marketing campaign.

Here everything is much more delicate, tenuous and magnetic.

Kristen Stewart in 'Crimes Of The Future'.

The film recounts the life of Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen), an artist known for his revolutionary and subversive performances and for his ability to 'give birth' to an excited public like aerialists do somersaults.

With the help of Caprice (Léa Seydoux), a former surgeon, he stages the removal and metamorphosis of his viscera.

Timlin (Kristen Stewart), a researcher at the Office of the National Organ Registry, closely follows her practices.

And so on until a mysterious group appears to make Saul the prophet of the imminent stage of human evolution.

"Can the human body evolve to solve the problems that we have created?

Can it generate a system that allows it to digest plastic and synthetic materials, not only with the aim of providing a solution to the issue of climate change, but to grow, prosper and survive?" asks Cronenberg, who has become his own messiah.

The camera moves between its own desolation with a gesture of astonishment in each calculated and sleepwalking panorama, in each whisper, in each staging of what may come.

In short, Cronenberg organizes a warm and precise tribute to himself that has something of an irrefutable mausoleum.

And there his virtue and his penance.

That nothing surprises can be both a great virtue and the greatest flaw.

Cronenberg eats Cronenberg in a solemn Eucharist of himself.

But, as in the Eresictón case, there is no Cronenberg for so much hunger.

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