Four Unloved Women, Adrift on a Purposeless Sea, Experience the Ecstasy of Dissection
Written and Directed by David Cronenberg
Runtime 4 Minutes
Streaming on MUBI November 1

by Sasha Ravitch, Staff Writer

There is a romance to what once was, as if the creations which came before are somehow more substantial than the postmodern synthetics we find ourselves “resisting” (maybe by osmosis). David Cronenberg has never been one to resist the long (cyborg) arm of technology. Videodrome, Existenz, Crimes of the Future, and The Shrouds are all fearlessly candid, obliquely trenchant, and petulantly mirthful in their confrontation of this “new flesh”–this body of synthetic organs sliding beneath taut skin, and of the chimerical human-machine, an erotic amalgam of steel and sinew. Films like Crash, adapted from the perennial masterpiece written by J.G. Ballard, likewise speaks to the explicitly sexual (and implicitly sensual) amorous nature of the object-body, where Dead Ringers meets Crimes of the Future in its capacity to explore dissection and desecration for the fecundating carnal symbolism.

Four Unloved Women, Adrift on a Purposeless Sea, Experience the Ecstasy of Dissection is so unmistakably Cronenberg, and yet gleefully rebellious in the face of his decades-long cultivation of tailored, signifying chains. The four-minute short is beautiful. The auteur responsible for giving the body back its fangs, claws, and fiberglass veins, trades his archetypal clinical catastrophe for decadent, exquisite tableaus of 18th century wax cadaver models in various phases of disembowelment. The quality of color and its saturation (with petrifying pastels), the neoclassical motifs (reclining, anhedonic, lovely), the aphrodisiacal malaise of Four Unloved Women recalls von Trier’s Melancholia or Greenaway’s The Pillow Book, while maintaining the incorruptible character of Cronenberg’s distinct voice.

The slow pans of softly slipstreaming models recline on their watery beds like satiated paramours, awash in the afterglow of endorphins. The images are accompanied by the sounds of echoey simpering, of ur-feminine moaning and gasping, as if a field recording from a grotto where nymphs play amongst the waves (and with each other). And all of this overt eroticism is complicated by the drifting sense of melancholy which isolates each figure, even as she glides across the surface of the water in her uncanny quartet. As per his usual deftness, Cronenberg both makes an art piece out of the object of the body, while simultaneously ensorcelling it with a throbbing, incandescent aliveness, autonomy, and humanity. The personhood of the models, their personality and their pleasures, are on display alongside their intestines and other innards.

Short, sweet, and sigh-inducing, Four Unloved Women, Adrift on a Purposeless Sea, Experience the Ecstasy of Dissection is a love letter to the ennui of existence and non-existence, to the carceral and cruel beauty of the body, to meaninglessness overcome by aesthetic, to finding tenderness beneath the blade. A stirring and memorable short film full of euphoria and despair.