David Cronenberg, the Toronto-born movie director, is the subject of a retrospective mounted by the Toronto International Film Festival.
From Within: The Films of David Cronenberg runs until Jan. 19, 2014 at the TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West).
Cronenberg launched his career with Stereo in 1969, and has made such films as Shivers, Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch, The Fly, M. Butterfly and Eastern Promises.
His latest picture, Cosmopolis, appeared in 2012.
Recently, he completed production of Maps to the Stars, which stars Julianne Moore, John Cusack and Mia Wasikowska.
One of Canada’s best known directors, he is a master of the horror science fiction genre, but some of his films are pretty much conventional in terms of plot. In Dead Ringers, Jeremy Irons portrays twin gynecologists whose symbiotic bond leads them toward mutual self-destruction. In M. Butterfly, Irons is a French diplomat in China who falls in love with an opera singer, not realizing “she” is both a man and a spy.
One of his earliest movies, Fast Company (1979), which is also straightforward in its story line, attests to his fascination with cars and car crashes.
Filmed in Alberta with a virtually unknown cast, Fast Company unfolds in the seamy, super-charged world of drag racing and takes place in the northwestern United States. There are spectacular crashes and steamy personal dramas, all capped off with a fiery helicopter crash that handily disposes of a class-A villain.
Crash (1996), starring James Spader and Holly Hunter, is explicitly sexual but not pornographic, and fetishistic in terms of its obsession with the automobile. There is even a scene in which the fatal car accident of American actor/heartthrob James Dean is recreated.
Crash falls under the general category of acquired taste, being eerie, odd and periodically incomprehensible. But it’s definitely vintage Cronenberg.
For more information on TIFF’s Cronenberg retrospective, log on to tiff.net