Presented at the Cannes Festival in competition, Shrouds Partly left us on the tile. Nevertheless sincere film of the master of the fantastic, The Shrouds in English evokes the widower's painful journey to mourn. Karsh, 50, is a brilliant businessman. Inconsolable since his wife's death, he has been marketing a revolutionary system, GraveTech, an application that connects to the dead in their shrouds.
Skin-flowered Cronenberg
Almost 15 years after his participation in the film A Dangerous Method, French actor Vincent Cassel returns to the casting of the Canadian director. In the role of Karsh, Cassel astonished by his flegmatism, he who lives a mourning that seems endless. With his process GraveTech, Karsh can see in the coffins buried and this up to 8K! The word « Flax » refers to the funerary veil that envelops the corpses to hide them from the living. But in the film, these shrouds wrapped in digital sensors allow the bodies to decompose. Cronenberg thus reverses the grammar of our funeral rites, which deny a reality. Paradoxically Death does not deprive the widower of real memories that sometimes echo in a dream.
Karsh is not grieved, he is the archetype of the intellectual who seeks meaning after the loss of his wife. Clearly less focused on the fantastic fantasies we know in Cronenberg, Shrouds above all, and above all, these dialogues through technology. « Can we still hide things from Google? ? » Karsh was questioning at the beginning of the film. Many sequences are reported by discussion facetime or by Hunny, an AI that swears by its simplistic cartoon representation at the time when video games offer almost photorealistic graphics and animations.
The futuristic side therefore lacks some additional credit. While images of the dead are presented in 8K, the AI, which serves as a confidant to Karsh, gives the impression that it was made for mobile ten years ago. Shouldn't we have chosen a holographic representation as in Blade Runner 2049 Villeneuve? But where it hurts, is that this device of staging by technological intermediaries quickly becomes redundant with a camera as static as possible, in the image of Karsh's almost neurasthenic side. The narration struggles to take off, except for rare carnal flights that leave us from this field / dusty counterfield.
Death in the skin
While his graveyard 2.0 was ravaged at the beginning of the film, Karsh and his team sought to find the culprits. The hypotheses flourish between conspiracy theories and paranoia. We are always at the same level as Karsh, immersed in ignorance and in search of answers. It is the imperative need to tell each other stories to conjure death. A vain step that eats up Karsh who wants to share Rebecca's tomb right now. On certain aspects, Shrouds can also remind the upsetting Her for the emotional nodes and the breakdown of confidence that induce a relationship with an AI. Very verbose, the last Cronenberg is too talkative, although this story remains intimately linked to the author's personal experience. It is impossible not to see the autobiographical side of the person who lost his wife. David Cronenberg wrote this film in tribute to his own wife, who disappeared seven years ago. The author himself acknowledges:
« It's a very personal project for me. People who know me will know which parts are autobiographical »
Some will understand that Vincent Cassel is double Cronenberg in the film. These include taboo subjects such as the body that we are deprived of by the disease. Prior to her death, Karsh's wife, Rebecca, underwent heavy medical treatment and progressive amputations either real or experienced as such. A mental path for Karsh is then emerging, as if he had been gradually deprived of his partner's body. A suitable body by doctors who are looking for a miracle remedy, even exhausting bodies and souls.
It's the « Doctors' plot », the incomprehension of loved ones who sometimes feel medicine as hard work. A situation that recalls the excellent comic book Night Druillet. This radical work was opened by a preface allowing the author to be angry and bereaved after the death of his wife, suffering from a fulgurant cancer.. Shrouds He also exposes us the state of ederation caused by the death of others and the irrational need to find a culprit as Cronenberg rightly explains:
« Most people can't bear that there's no explanation for death. Like death should make sense. It's not a real conspiracy, but guilt is so great that you can't stand chance or accident. There must be a culprit. Free death terrifies people more than death itself »
Through his encounters with women who gravitate around this mystery, Karsh also rediscovers a sexuality now imbued with morbid thoughts. These scenes with Diane Kruger are particularly successful and disturbing. These dead or living bodies cross the entire film and are an obsession for Karsh. Seeing decomposition is keeping an eternal bond with the deceased.
With this intimate film, Cronenberg manages to show us how intimately Death and Desire are. Death is also a desire for reconstruction with oneself and others. However, if it is certainly one of Cronenberg's most sincere films, the overly complex nature of an improbable case does not allow the spectator to be sufficiently breathed. Less experimental than his last film Crimes of the Future (read our criticalThe Shrouds shows more sobriety. The director's fans risk suffering from the absence of hallucinating sequences. She, too, showed restraint to which we were less accustomed by the master of the Body Horror. If he will not make a date like other works in his filmography, Shrouds remains a reflection on mourning. The film is expected at the cinema on September 25, 2024 in France.
Movie trailer The Shrouds
[...] Very represented this year, this theme was omnipresent. First by denunciation of the mullah diktat with the Seeds of Mohammad Rasoulof's wild fig tree. Then through the dictatorship of images and the cult of gambling in The Substance. The problem of sexual emancipation in India, a country torn apart by the persecution of Muslims by Hindus, could also be mentioned, as All We imagine as Light denounced with poetry. The same was true of the palm of Anora, a burning feminist plea armored with humor about sex workers. In his latest feature film Parthenope, Sorrentino treated a woman with magnetic beauty and repelled men's desires. An inaccessible heroine who sees « desire as a mystery » and « sex as her funeral ». The theme of domestic violence was not left behind with She Cronenberg, for his part, detrigued our report on mourning and the fate reserved for the remains of the deceased in his latest very personal film, Les Linceuls. [...]