Crash

Written and Directed by David Cronenberg.
Cast: James Spader, Holly Hunter, Elias Koteas, Deborah Kara Unger, Rosana Arquette, Peter MacNeill.
Music Composed and Performed by Howard Shore.
Runtime: 98min.
Canada, 1996

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This obsessive adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s novel turns into a hard psychological affair of sexual compulsion and hardcore demency when a group of emotionally detached individuals find pleasure, sex and escape in car accidents.

A truly weird film about the deepness of our modern world’s perversion, a deranged visual experience that puts your head in an exhausting twist.

Commonly, for most of us human beings, a car accident fuels our desire for voyeurism in a twisted way. It’s something behind our control, we need to watch. Ballard’s novel relates sex with technology written in a cold, detached way. Cronenberg’s movie is no different. Right from the start he puts you in the main role – you, as the voyeur, as the eyes that fuel every emotion; the technology and the characters as mere pawns in the twisted world of wreckage.

Filmed as an almost diabolical nightmare, there is no certainty of time, days become night almost vaguely, the characters are almost pathetically empty – yet, deeply disturbed, deeply rooted into their intense fetishism. More than a mere visual journey, it twists your brain as if you were in a permanent car crash.

Here, the crash is just a mere metaphor for our consumerism, for our detachment of emotions. We root in objects, in technology. Here the sex is the extreme personification of our evilness, of our constant pursue of the next object to attach.

This wonderful and heavy disturbed film is such a weird experience, yet so violently real that you become glued to its visual dementia. It’s almost as if the plot advances with no sensation of time or place, and the only real thing to hold on is the exact same love the characters embrace. Gorgeously shot in deep blues and whites, a gorgeous disturbing soundtrack by Howard Shore, intense sexual intercourse and a great cast of actors, just brilliantly off-beat.

But because the plot advances in a dreamlike state and the characters appear out of the blue like dead bodies and stay like that in a trance for the entirity of the film, because the atmosphere is deeper than the actual notion of conflict-resolution, because the soundtrack is shrieking, Crash is almost a bad movie, one of those you hate for life, because it is so true, so intense. This is, truly, a heavy movie, not for every taste.

Yet, if you feel compelled and secure of your own dilemmas, watch it and you’ll never see a car accident with the same eyes. I’m having difficulties getting in a car at night without visualizing Elias Koteas character Vaughan coming up the other side of the lane.

Painful, but just plain gorgeous for those who don’t fear giving up their secrets and embrace their darkest sexual deviance.

Buy this DVD from Amazon:
Crash (Uncut) [1997] [DVD]

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