Cinema
Crash (18, selected cinemas)
The cars have it
Mark Steyn
Like a Number 73 bus, Crash has finally turned up. In Canada, it played unobtru- sively at art-houses for months; in America, where it was released a couple of months back, it quietly dribbled away. But only in Britain has it driven media, censors and local government drones into a frenzy, even though the row seems even more out of proportion to the film itself than it did last year.
If only Crash were that exciting. Adapted by David Cronenberg from J.G. Ballard's 1973 novella, the film updates the sex'n'wrecks to the Nineties and relocates from the North Circular Road to Toronto's Highway 401 and Queen Elizabeth Way. The story concerns James and Catherine Ballard, a couple of Canadian swingers who fall in with a group of auto-philiacs when James (James Spader) crashes into an oncoming car and kills the driver, though not his wife. With her dead spouse beside her, Dr Helen Remington (Holly Hunter) flashes a breast at James, appar- ently under the impression that this is the universally recognised Province of Ontario Highway Code pictogram for May I see your insurance?'
In a porn movie, the actors at least pre- tend to be whipped up: 'Ooh, ja, baby, that pipphole bra rilly turns me on, etc.' But in art-house erotica the participants increas- ingly affect a kind of inertia somewhere between sophisticated ennui and a general anaesthetic. Even so, the auto-erotic automatons of Crash break new ground. in glassy-eyed torpor. Thus, the film begins with Deborah Kara Unger, as Spader s wife, being humped against an aeroplane engine. The last time I saw Deborah Kara Unger in a movie she was called Deborah Unger. Perhaps she added the 'Kara' as a sign of solidarity with the film's other prin- cipal sexual participants — the cars. What- ever the reason, she is a quintessential David Cronenberg player — controlled, measured, trance-like, a rental car on cruise control in an empty parking-lot. In all the many sex scenes she plays, she always looks the same — bored out of her head with the distant but mildly distracted expression of an overbooked hooker trying to recall in reverse order the governors- general of Canada since 1867 but unable to get past the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava. Cronenberg arranges her private parts as if they're still lies, and they sit there on the screen for what seems like forever, occa- sionally inching forward like an Austin Princess stuck in contraflow on the Hangar Lane Giratory System. If a watched kettle never boils, so a watched Deborah Kara Unger sex scene never climaxes. Whether hugging her on the hard shoulder after a car crash or rear-ending her in their apart- ment, James Spader clings on awkwardly, as if to a blow-up doll — on which Miss Unger's interpretation of her role seems to have been modelled, at least to the extent that her eyes never seem to be pointing in quite the right direction.
It is, in its way, a magnificent perfor- mance. Cronenberg has been trying for years to make the first wholly lobotomised motion picture but unfortunate misjudg- ments of casting have usually wound up humanising the picture — think of what The F6.7 could have been like without Jeff Goldblum. In Miss Unger, Cronenberg has at last found his perfect on-screen alter- ego. By comparison with the glacial Cana- dian actress, Holly Hunter and Rosanna Arquette, no matter how valiantly they struggle to suppress their natural perkiness, come on like nymphomaniac cheerleaders. Miss Hunter, straddling Spader in the front of his car, thrusts up and down with the grimly earnest air of someone plodding through their daily Royal Canadian Air Force exercise quota. Meanwhile, Rosanna Arquette gives the same performance she's given in every film since Desperately Seeking Susan, except that this time, as a badly- scarred crash victim, she's in leg-irons and matching fishnets, underneath which can be glimpsed strange vagina-like wounds — sort of Desperately Seeking Sutures. As she clanks about, Spader finds himself incredi- bly turned on and eventually sweet-talks her into the back of the car at the scrap- yard where he has penetrative sex with one of her wounds. For all the skill with which he wedges her lifeless legs into position, you can't help feeling that, in a real auto- mobile, her left foot would have set off the rear windshield wiper and her right the Bert Kaempfert Greatest Hits cartridge on the eight-track.
The movie could use a little of that. For a film that yokes together two staples of screen action — sex and car crashes — Cronenberg's picture is curiously station- ary. Characters sit silently in cars, commu- nicating only in random hissed pseudo- poetic observations. I'd like to think the film's lack of success in America is due to the public's innate instinct for bullshit: they know that car crashes aren't erotic, and that Cronenberg can't convince you other- wise. Touted as the most controversial movie of his career, Crash is, in fact, the phoniest.
Previous page
