Review: eXistenZ
"People are programmed to accept so little but the possibilities are so great," Allegra Gellar (Jennifer Jason Leigh) observes in David Cronenberg's latest mind warp eXistenZ.
eXistenZ is the latest game that famed game designer Allegra has created. Like most games in this seemingly post apocalyptic setting, it is plugged into a bioport, an electrical outlet that's positioned on the human spine. The body, then, is the power source for the virtual reality game. Before Allegra can fully download her program into the dozen volunteers of the test group, a man in the audience storms to the stage, declares, "Death to the demoness!" and fires. Pandemonium ensues and Allegra is taken into safety by Ted Pikul (Jude Law), a marketing trainee who becomes her unwitting bodyguard.
Allegra, who's spent five years developing the game for Antenna Research, fears for the state of her game pod. The pod, which resembles a kidney or an embryonic fetus with umbilical cord-like plugs, is made of fertilized amphibian eggs stuffed with synthetic DNA so it's prone to contamination and disease. The only way to find out if the pod is contaminated is to play the game. With someone friendly, Allegra stresses. "Are you friendly?" she asks Ted.
Yes, but he's without a bioport. After several mishaps, he's finally fitted with one and the game begins. He finds himself with Allegra in a neon-lit game emporium. When he pries Allegra for the purpose of the game, she teases, "You have to play the game to find out why you're playing the game." So play it they do, finding themselves in some intrigue. During lunch at the Chinese restaurant by the fish factory, Ted and Allegra order the special, a stew of mutant reptiles and amphibians, per his Russian coworker's instructions. Ted discovers, to his horror, that the bones can be fashioned together into a gun, with teeth as bullets. It is the same weapon that was used on Allegra.
Everybody they encounter is a potential threat. Gas (Willem Dafoe -- gloriously, grotesquely crazed), the station attendant who may harbor hopes of assassinating Allegra; her friend Kiri Vinokur (Ian Holm), who wants her to defect to Antenna Research's competitor. Allegra is worth more dead than alive but eXistenZ may hold the secret to what's going on in her real life. But real life isn't so inviting once you play a game. "I'm not sure here, where we are, is real at all," Ted marvels to Allegra after having paused the game and awakened to his reality. "This feels like a game to me."
eXistenZ, to put it simply, will gross you out. It carries the Cronenbergian penchant for zooming his camera in on bloody moments and inspecting them at a Kubrickian distance. The techno-eroticism Cronenberg explored in Crash is on display here: Allegra fingers Ted's bioport suggestively while another scene has Ted tonguing her bioport. Sex without actually performing it -- actually, living without actually living your life is a main theme here. Though other themes, such as corporate technology, make their appearance, it is this existentialist observation of how we escape our lives by embracing other realities that dominates. Think how reliant we've become on technology, how they aid us in avoiding our own lives. Don't Internet surfers pretend to be young, blond and busty when they're really housewives in New Jersey? Technology makes us more intimate with each other. . .but through a distance darkly.
Like most Cronenberg works, eXistenZ has an elusive quality that will likely polarize audiences, yet it's worth a look. It's not as clinical or perverse in subject as Crash. This is more neo-futuristic noir. Leigh, looking sleek, conveys a somnambulant moodiness. This is not to say that she is sleepwalking through her role but rather that she is effective as someone for whom the line between reality and the dreamworld is nonexistent. There's a moment towards the end when she asks, "Have I won the game?" The question is posed with a chilling, desperate enthusiasm and you realize how disengaged she is from reality.
Law has always been expert at finding the hidden vulnerabilities that betray his characters' narcissistic exteriors. That's what made him ideal as the perfect specimen turned paraplegic in Gattaca, and what should make him so noteworthy as the privileged Dickie Greenleaf, whose life Matt Damon's character covets in the upcoming The Talented Mr. Ripley. He's not required to be so snobbish here but his performance as Ted Pikul is practically chameleonic. A blink of an eye and he's sympathetically oblivious; another blink and he's recklessly handsome; yet another blink and he bears the dangerous charm of an assassin.
eXistenZ
Directed by: David Cronenberg
Written by: David Cronenberg
Starring: Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jude Law, Willem Dafoe, Christopher Eccleston, Ian Holm, Don McKellar, Sarah Polley, Callum Keith Rennie
