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| DVD,
Justin Harries,
20 January 1999 |
Rating: F5
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Theatrically released to a flurry of controversy, Cronenberg's nihilistic porno finds a favourable home on DVD.
For all the protesting over the banning in Whitehall, it’s easy to see why the Mary Whitehouse brigade got their knickers in such a twist. Car crashes, like cancer, are rather taboo and not prone to overt dissection, especially in a stylised sexual context such as this. Conservatives may find the connotations offensive and degenerate, in fact, for anyone looking for the opportunity to lecture on their soapbox about the evils of extreme expression, Crash represents a once in a lifetime opportunity.
Remaining faithful to Ballad's novel, Crash charts the course of the author’s self-monikered (surely the creepiest aspect to the book) protagonist as he attempts to smash the veil of his complacent and bourgeoisie existence. This entails mucho copulating, stimulated from a near fatal car crash, that successively gets as extreme as our hero gets monosyllabic.
Cronenberg is normally noted for his flights into the more fantastic, however, as with the earlier Dead Ringers, he couches this story in a realistic world. Still, Crash presents the directors underlying preoccupations and obsession with transgression in a very concise and direct way. More successful than the rather pointless adaptation (elaboration) of Naked Lunch, he does not see fit to exaggerate the novel's excesses. The nature of a filmic experience focuses the story's repetitive structure, creating a blank, obsessive world for the characters to inhabit. Performances are stupefied to the point of somnambulisim, Elias Koteas as Vaughn, the semen stained pervert fixated on the moment of impact, is the only source of energy here. Howard Shore's score, with its chiming guitar, is especially soul sucking, and the dialogue is spartan to the point of Calvinistic. When combined with Cronenberg's glacial, dispassionate camera scanning yet another wreck or screw, these elements create one hell of a hypnotic, black hole of a movie.
You may gather from all this that Crash is a rather turgid, depressing affair, at best simply boring, bizarrely, it's not. I wouldn’t go as far as saying it’s life affirming, but it’s certainly mesmerising, and curiously affecting. Like Dead Ringers, there is a certain release in the conclusion; however, as with the other, the movie's unique atmosphere remains with you long after the initial viewing.
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