Brandon Cronenberg will adapt J.G. Ballard’s… | Little White Lies

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Bran­don Cro­nen­berg will adapt J.G. Ballard’s nov­el Super-Cannes for TV

20 May 2021

Words by Charles Bramesco

Four men in casual clothing standing in a corridor, one smiling.
Four men in casual clothing standing in a corridor, one smiling.
He’ll make Bal­lard a fam­i­ly busi­ness with the vision of tech­no-dystopia in the south of France.

The works of nov­el­ist J.G. Bal­lard have inspired a hand­ful of adap­ta­tions, few of them suc­cess­ful. While Ben Wheat­leys 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, über-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 pre­mière, it’ll be a major event no mat­ter where it lands.

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