Left to right: French actor Vincent Cassel, Canadian director David Cronenberg and German actress Diane Kruger arrive for the screening of the film The Shrouds at the Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, southern France, on May 20, 2024.LOIC VENANCE/Getty Images
Vincent Cassel wishes all the young filmmakers working today knew who David Cronenberg was.
“I’m not sure they do,” laments the French actor, who first worked with Cronenberg in the mob drama Eastern Promises and reunited with the Canadian auteur on The Shrouds. “A lot of people are making movies and they don’t know anything about the history of cinema,” he says. “They think they invent something, but they don’t know that it comes from …”
Cassel pauses, searching for the words to describe the way directors among the new generation are borrowing from the past and even making it accessible, yet coming off as ignorant about those influences. It’s a fitting sentiment for what we saw play out at the Cannes Film Festival nearly a year ago, when I had separate conversations with Cassel and his Shrouds co-star Diane Kruger.
The night before our interviews, on a rooftop terrace overlooking yachts on the Cote D’Azur, Cronenberg’s latest had just premiered. In The Shrouds, the director channelled his own grief over losing his wife into the story of a widower using the latest tech to stay close to his. It received mixed reviews, despite being Cronenberg’s best in nearly two decades and certainly his most achingly vulnerable.
At the same festival, The Substance, which repurposes ideas from The Fly in a takedown of celebrity culture and a dramatization of the generational rift that Cassel described, launched its way toward Oscar glory, eventually nabbing six nominations including best picture and director. No shade to The Substance, but its superficial homage is no match for Cronenberg’s meaningful, sophisticated and affecting ways. The gulf between the receptions for both films amplified how much the “new flesh” takes Cronenberg for granted.
Cassel stars in The Shrouds as Karsh, a Cronenberg doppelganger of sorts, sporting the same white hair and black attire we so often see the director in. Cassel’s instantly recognizable angular face even resembles Cronenberg’s a bit.
Karsh is the proprietor behind GraveTech, a technology that does for the inside of a grave what the Ring app does for front doors. Families can observe their deceased loved ones at any time through a shroud wrapped around their cadavers, which live streams their slow decay from six feet under. Karsh isn’t just the president. He’s a despairing client, regularly checking in on his own late wife (Kruger).
“It’s still the same thing about technology and body,” says Cassel, speaking to how Cronenberg’s movies such as Scanners and Videodrome, which he grew up watching, obsessed over a merger between the body and technology in ways both philosophical and grotesque. The Shrouds is about what happens when that technology chases the body into death.
Cassel describes The Shrouds, and its place in the director’s canon, with the French word “crépuscule,” which means dusk. “It’s kind of a sunset movie,” he explains about the film’s more melancholic tone. “He’s talking about his fears in a more intimate way. … Karsh is inventing those shrouds to cope with his grief. David is making this movie to cope with his grief.”
Cassel stars in The Shrouds as Karsh, a Cronenberg doppelganger of sorts, who is the proprietor behind GraveTech, a technology that allows families to observe their deceased loved ones at any time through a shroud wrapped around their cadavers, which live streams their slow decay from six feet under.Sophie Giraud/Gravetech Productions
Kruger had maybe the most gruelling task in The Shrouds, playing the haunting spectre of Karsh’s wife in various stages of decay, along with her guilt-ridden twin sister and a menacing AI assistant.
Many of Kruger’s scenes, the kind that would demand an intimacy co-ordinator, bring another generational divide to mind. Cronenberg has been outspoken about how cinema, in its recent Marvelization and response to #MeToo, has turned puritanical, with sex pushed to the margins. “Movies were made for sex,” the director once told The Guardian, which isn’t a surprising position from the man who once made Cannes blush with his twisted metal and limbs thriller Crash.
“I don’t know if, today, American Gigolo would be made,” says Kruger, who along with Cassel agrees that Cronenberg is a director who makes sex on screen meaningful and impactful. Think back not just to erotic fare such as Crash but also genre films such as A History of Violence, Cronenberg’s brilliant neo-western about a picturesque American family succumbing to the dark side of hero myths. The sex scenes evolve along with the characters, turning from playful and almost innocent, with Maria Bello’s character role-playing American iconography as a cheerleader, to ugly and violent.
The most devastating and resonant moment in The Shrouds happens during a sex scene, during a memory when an attempt at intimacy between Karsh and his wife, while her body is ravaged by cancer, breaks her hip. It’s a shocking moment of overwhelming longing and despair, which Kruger says is drawn from Cronenberg’s own memories, making those scenes especially hard on her.
Shooting those scenes was especially hard on Kruger. “It’s weird to be in that setting and feeling like your director is obviously reliving a very traumatic moment in his life,” she says, adding that however uneasy it felt, she’s glad she did it. “To me, it was 100 per cent necessary because that’s really what the movie talks about: The physical love that you have with someone and the physical grief you have when that person’s body is gone. It made me emotional.”
She brings up something Cronenberg has said, which Karsh’s character repeats. Seeing his wife in the coffin, Cronenberg described an overwhelming urge to get in there with her.
“It makes me think more about relationships with your partner,” says Kruger. “If you’re so lucky to get to spend 40 years together, what would that be like to be apart? … The thought of it being so unfair that she should be physically alone in death just took my breath away.”
The Shrouds opens in select theatres April 25.
Special to The Globe and Mail
