CRASH TEST
RECENTLY RESTORED CRONENBERG FILM STILL PROVOCATIVE AS IT RETURNS TO SOME THEATRES
Crash
Cast: James Spader, Deborah Kara Unger, Holly Hunter, Elias Koteas Director: David Cronenberg Duration: 1 h 42 m
David Cronenberg’s 1996 film about people who get turned on by car crashes has aged remarkably well since its debut at the Cannes Film Festival, an event that prompted Britain’s Daily Mail to demand on its front page: “Ban This Car Crash Sex Film.”
You wouldn’t want to take kids, easily upset elders or car lovers to the recently restored re-release, but the sex scenes, while intense, feel less shocking in this century than they did in the last. Like the vehicles in the film, the sex is vintage.
James Spader plays film director James Ballard ( also the name of the British author on whose novel the film is based). He and wife Catherine ( Deborah Kara Unger) have an open relationship; early scenes show each having sex with someone else, then meeting to discuss the details.
But after a bad car crash James develops a fixation on the other survivor ( Holly Hunter) and on car crashes in general. They find themselves drawn into the orbit of Vaughan (Elias Koteas), who stages famous crashes (think James Dean) with stunt drivers.
The performances are weirdly flat — clearly an artistic choice by the director, though it did feed into the ’ 90s cliché of Canadian cinema being as icy cold as a Winnipeg winter. But Spader is perfectly cast as the perverted filmmaker — contemporary audiences would still have fairly fresh memories of him in 1989’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape, though he was still a few years away from 2002’s Secretary. And Koteas is wonderfully creepy — there’s a scene where he’s standing behind Spader and can’t stop himself from sniffing the man’s leather jacket. And another in a car wash, about which I can only say: It ain’t touchless.
Crash famously won a special jury prize at Cannes for “for originality, for daring and for audacity,” an award that has not been bestowed before or since in the festival’s 73-year history, and probably never will. But the divisive response at the festival may have been the mark of a film released ahead of its time. The year after it came out, Ian McEwan published Enduring Love, another tale of accident-induced obsession that was made into a movie in 2004.
That was also the year that Paul Haggis released the Oscar- winning, confusingly titled Crash, a story of race and redemption that hasn’t aged nearly as well. Get them confused at your peril! This is the only one featuring actual bootleg marijuana ( as in, it’s hidden in someone’s bootleg), and the ultra- Cronenbergian line from Koteas’s character: “We are all intimately involved in the reshaping of the human body by modern technology.”
Oh, and this weird bit of dialogue between Hunter and Spader. She asks from the front seat: “Have you come?” He in the back replies calmly: “I’m all right.” So there’s a laugh or two to be had, as well.
Crash is playing in Montreal, Vancouver and Toronto theatres. It will be on demand beginning Nov. 24.