Cosmópolis, by David Cronenberg – Otros Cines review www.otroscines.com http://www.otroscines.com/criticas_detalle.php?idnota=6864
Citizen Packer
Diego Lerer
Released November 8, 2012

4 1/2 stars out of 5

"The contemporary painter perceives that he is in the threshold of a new era, where the decorative aspects of his art should be transcended in a way that his concept could be projected in the art".
(Barnett Newman, The Plasmic Image, 1945)

The initial credits of Cosmopolis develop on a background that seems to imitate a Jackson Pollock painting being done in the moment. Whereas the end credits do something similar with works that could be Mark Rothko’s, whose name is mentioned as an important part (thematically)of this adaptation of Don DeLillo’s novel to the cinema, directed by David Cronenberg. In some interviews, the helmer of The Fly and A History of Violence said that with those choices, he wanted to ¨frame¨ the protagonist’s attempt – a 28 years old multimillionaire financier – to travel from chaos (Pollock) to calm (Rothko). In a more formalist sense, one could say that those paintings in movement are the adequate frame to the stylistic choices of the film and that Cosmopolis could be thought as a form of cinematography abstract expressionism.

Even though the movie is, to put in some way, figurative (there is a story, a plot, characters, conflicts, faces and bodies), it becomes more fascinating to watch if one thinks of it as an abstraction in movement: people, texts and situations that, more than representing a real world (which is talked of, but almost not seen) seem to be pure concept, mannequins luck from a universe that functions – as the Stock Market from which Packer’s fortune depends – in terms purely abstract.

Cosmopolis narrates a voyage in a car to a haircut salon and that is all. Formally opposed to films like Bycicle Thieves, the adventure – notwithstanding – allows the protagonist to approach a world that, at least in his head (or in his memories: the¨haircut salon¨ is the Rosebud of this story) was sometime real. The encounters are there – the film is in a sense, an account of appointments and conversations in a moving office; not only to reveal to us that under the secure appearance of a white limousine (you’ll have to wait for the release of Holy Motors of Leos Carax to notice the common aspects both movies have, among them: the limo) where a millionaire travels across Manhattan, there is a urban chaos and a universe of various neurosis, but also leave us the impression that said world is, definitely, irretrievable.

Packer travels in his white limo across Manhattan with traffic closed on account of the president’s visit (¨Which president?¨ he asks to his bodyguard: countries have stopped being a valid idea in his vocabulary ) and by a series of street manifestations. Packer knows – or supposes – that he is being pursued by someone to assassinate him, and moving him through the city is a risk no one is willing to take. But Packer needs his haircut, his ¨return to his roots¨.

Along the journey it will arise the conflict that gives life, if you so wishes, to the film’s plot: the yuan is going up without control, but Packer (a perfect Robert Pattinson in the role, in an almost ¨bressonian¨ tone of performance, almost without inflections) plays his cards that it is going down. As that doesn’t happen, the man loses millions and millions every minute that goes by. Nothing seems to matter: on the contrary, this wakes him up. Always in the car, he will be visited by his market analysts, a doctor, a lover, will step out of the car to visit his equally distant wife, outside he will be attacked by some protester and will go back to the car to continue a itinerary that doesn’t seem to advance much. The car here is like a space capsule and gives de impression of moving with that grandiloquent slowness that posses the objects circulating outside the physics imperatives of the world.

This is where Packer is and where his story develops. Abstract numbers, dry sex, mechanical conversations, robotic behaviours. All his encounters have an absurd logic, as in a nightmare and by the way they seem to not always connect well between them, there is the impression that not everything could be happening in the mind of this man that begins to feel liberated while his empire of graphs cracks.

Citizen Packer, sometime, should deal with ¨the outside¨ and, even when the movie will enter a more conventional zone (the reality is conventional and much less interesting, Cronenberg seems to say, the method acting of Paul Giamatti in that part of the film shows the crash in an impeccable way), it will never stop fascinating us with his power of observation and his meticulous and clinical staging. His use of digital – it’s the first time that Cronenberg films this way – is so brutally hyperrealistic that ends being almost immaterial, as if you are viewing one of those long animated films by Robert Zemeckis, with the characters of inexpressive looks and digitally painted scenarios.

Cosmopolis is a film where Cronenberg goes a step beyond certain thematic and formal obsessions he always had. Many will miss something more ¨intense¨ from the him, but the helmer of Videodrome and Crash (movies that along with Cosmopolis could form a trilogy on the destruction of ego and body as a nirvana to be achieved) seems to have entered a more cerebral and autoreflective stage in his cinematography.

In A Dangerous Method, that stylistic operation was too close to ¨de qualité¨ cinema, that took as a matrix, and – in my opinion – did not disassociate completely to make it its own. There is no more ¨matrix¨ here than the nightmarish conception of the world, a place where talking heads and inert bodies bounce between themselves, verbal and physically until they explode in a thousand flow diagrams and infinite vectors.

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