The works of novelist J.G. Ballard have inspired a handful of adaptations, few of them successful. While Ben Wheatley‘s take on High-Rise drew polarized reviews, there’s a wider critical consensus that David Cronenberg more keenly understood the given material when he brought the psycho-erotic thriller Crash to the screen in 1996.
The complex work of visualizing Ballard’s dense, often abstract prose will become a family business in the near future, according to a new bulletin on Deadline. Brandon Cronenberg, a standout of the 2020 release slate for his hallucinatory horror/sci-fi hybrid Possessor, will adapt Ballard’s novel Super-Cannes for the small screen.
The Deadline item offers a tantalizing description of Ballard’s book, with a number of characteristics typical of his body of work: “Super-Cannes, first published in 2000, is set in an ultra-modern high tech business park in the hills above Cannes, where a global elite has gathered to form a closed, uber-capitalist, and high-tech community. A place of luxury homes, private doctors, and private security, this enclave hides an underworld of crime, sexual perversion, madness and manipulation that is rapidly spiraling out of control.”
Insularity, dangerous fusions of technology and human desire, sleek surfaces belying a fleshy carnality just underneath — it’s a Cronenberg production all right, that term being applicable to the father just as easily as the son, considering their shared preoccupations. Body horror and the degradation of society must have been popular topics at the kitchen table.
The production of Super-Cannes has funding, but no designated eventual home on television as of yet. But based on the hefty budget an endeavor like this would require to be done properly, when it does get a premiere, it’ll be a major event no matter where it lands.
Published 20 May 2021
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