DAVID CRONENBERG’S COSMOPOLIS: AN ALLEGORY OF A WORLD IN SHAMBLES

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In his most recent film, Cosmopolis (2012), David Cronenberg returns to his darkest, erotic and enigmatic side, adapting impeccably Don DeLillo’s novel of the same title. The film is situated in the present, but one that is not ours, it resembles it very much though it differs in ominous details, which make the spectator feel slightly disturbed. A sensation evocative of what Philip K. Dick said: ¨Sometimes people claim to remember past lives. I claim to remember a different present life¨.

This alternative present places us in the antechamber of the end of the world, of the worlds as we know it, simbolized with the slow but imminent death of capitalism.

The story follows Robert Pattinson’s character (Twilight), who surprises with an extraordinary performance (unlike his other attempt at an artistic proposal in Bel Ami). Pattinson, a multibillionaire financier of the cybercapita, travels stubbornly in his limousine through the streets of New York, in the middle of tumultuous disturbances - equivalent to the Occupy Wall Street- in search of a haircut. Through the tinted windows of his automobile we see the irruption of a new order, the energy of distruction, as Pattinson cites, is also the energy of creation.

In this hyper-equipped limousine, money – which has converted in pure information, in the ether Marx feared – shines in multiple screens, visual poetry that advances towards its demise.

Pattinson plays the brilliant and lecherous CEO of a company that deals in financial information. His extraordinary intellectual capacity does not prevent him to destroy his life in one day – ¨Wasted talent is more erotic¨ he says to one of the women with whom he has sex in his car. Cronenberg achieves to mix, as done in some of his films, the sexual tension with the fascination with death, that double face essential to the existence.

Pattinson’s character moves through New York streets hypnotically, infatuated with his own death, as one of those tragic characters that self destructs, owners of something this world cannot withstand, fulfilling a secret plot.

Cosmopolis marca el regreso de Cronenberg a su mejor cine, elegante y perturbador, en una visión distópica del mundo, indeteniblemente avanzando hacia una incomprensible redención.

Cosmopolis marks Cronenberg’s return to his best cinema, elegant and disturbing, in a dystopian view of the world, relentlessly moving towards an incomprehensible redemption.

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