Cosmmopoli - Los Inrockuptibles

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A terrible fable about capitalism, seen through the eyes of a financier in a limousine.

An adaptation (very faithful) from Dom De Lilo’s novel, Cosmopolis narrates a crossing through Manhattan at 10 Km/hour due to a presidential visit that paralyzes the traffic. As in the book, we immerse in the limousine with Eric Packer, golden boy, cynical and sexy, and we almost won’t get out.

Cosmopolis is a film of interiors, almost completely confined to a narrow but shifting place. Packer’s objective: to get a haircut across the other side of the city. Along the road he discusses with several associates (numbers and theories that we might thought came from a mathematician brain with too much speed or a cocaine addict philosopher), he crosses paths with his young wife, has sex with a lover, consult several screens that upholster the vehicle, looks through the tinted windows of his car the spectacle of a society on the verge of explosion: protesters, policemen, occupiers, form a flammable urban carnival that doesn’t leave you breathe.

This fragmented view of New York allows all possible symbolic readings. Occidental Babylon, faro city of capitalistic civilization since a hundred years, the NYC of Cosmopolis is a concentrate of our actual world. The very rich and the very poor coexist, as always has happened. The novelty is the promiscuity between the masters and the anonymous types provoked by the new technologies. Before, the poor didn’t see the rich. Today, distance doesn’t exist anymore, the proliferation of screens and the speed of communications reduce the whole planet little town where everything is close and everything is instantaneous, where desires and frustrations, failures and achievements, inclusion and exclusion boils in slow fire as if in a pressure cooker.

Cronenberg achieves to capture this unhealthy cohabitation between the 1 % and the 99%, filmed from the point of view of one of the new masters. It only takes Packer to close the windows to turn off the sound, even the image of this society in boiling point, that he contributed to heat up.

The limousine is a bubble, a shell, a protected place, regressive, isolated from the real world, as the luxurious universe and obscene remunerations where the tycoons of contemporary capitalism live. The inhabitant of this shell is a being half angel, half demon; a man who possesses everything , but that seems incapable or establishing a normal relationship with his fellow men, perpetual dissatisfied, unfinished human being who lacks an emotional compartment. The more he owns, the more neurotic he becomes.

Cronenberg chose Robert Pattinson: the actor/star goes from Twilight to Cosmopolis with an incredible easiness.
He plays incredibly well the mixture of youth and cruelty, of sex-appeal and decadence, of desire and death, the sickness of the winning attitude that limits with the morbid pathology that this film radiates and is the emblem of our times.
S.K. (Serge Kaganski)

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