CRASH Movie Review

After a sex scene in one of his movies. Woody Allen remarked “that was the most fun I ever had without laughing.” The characters of Crash might say that their sex is the most fun they've ever had without dying. It's dying—not what the French call “the little death” but what Canadian director David Cronenberg would call “the big one”—that these characters want to snuggle up to before leaving in the morning. In Cronenberg's visionary, ice-cold adaptation of J.G. Ballard's novel, the damaged victims/lovers/survivors of a head-on collision (James Spader and Holly Hunter) inhabit not just another state of mind; they seem to be living on another planet as well. It's a plane of existence well beyond “erotomania” or simple fetishism, induced by the near-death experience of a high-speed car crash that has almost literally “knocked the stuffing” out of the survivors. That stuffing was the filler of their lives; anything that gets in the way of reliving that moment of impact followed by the realization of survival—the greatest orgasmic intensity imaginable. Considering what a struggle it was to get the picture released. Crash hasn't provoked the outrage that its subject might suggest. The mechanical, repetitive quality of the sex scenes—mirroring the characters' helpless surrender to their poignantly obsessive, fetishistic impulses—is either alarmingly arousing to audiences or utterly absurd; either way couples find it safer to laugh the whole thing off as silly on the ride home, and quickly flip on Letterman when they climb into bed and crash for the night. A darkly funny vision of erotic obsession that has a lot more in common with Vertigo than it does with Grand Prix may, ironically, be one of the least pornographic movies ever made. “Those people are all so sad,” a disappointed, sensitive-sounding man complained after the lights went up, “isn't sex more fun than that?” His girlfriend flashed a look at him as if she wanted to say something, but she thought better of it and off they went to have fun. I think that Mr. Cronenberg—an extraordinary and witty artist—would have been pleased.

NEXT STOP … Dead Ringers, Last Tango in Paris, Damage

1995 (NC-17) 98m/C CA James Spader, Holly Hunter, Elias Koteas, Deborah Kara Unger, Rosanna Arquette, Peter MacNeill; D: David Cronenberg; W: David Cronenberg; C: Peter Suschitzsky; M: Howard Shore. Cannes Film Festival '96: Special Jury Prize; Genie Awards '96: Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Director (Cronenberg), Best Film Editing; Nominations: Genie Awards '96: Best Film, Best Sound. VHS, LV, Closed Caption NLC, CRC