CRASH
A film review by Deepak Singh
Copyright 1997 Deepak Singh
Crash (Canada, 1996)
Plot Summary: James Ballard (played by James Spader) and his partner Catherine (played by Deborah Unger) have numerous sexual liaisons with each other and with other people. Driving home one night, James is involved in a car accident with Dr. Helen Remington (played by Holly Hunter). Both have sustained major injuries and they are drawn together by the activities of Vaughan (played by Elias Koteas), a photographer who delights in capturing the essence, both spiritually and sexually, of renowned car crashes by re-enacting them or staging them. But how long can this deadly lifestyle last?
Watching CRASH was quite a cinematic experience. As far as I know, it was shown in only one Melbourne cinema (the Lumiere) and the theatre I saw it in could probably house a hundred people maximum. Reading press clippings about mass walkouts in Cannes and banishment from movie screens in South Australia and Western Australia added to the intrigue. The movie itself contains very extreme and disturbing scenes but largely insulated by its incendiary world, has a surrealistic look and feel. Yet, I came out of CRASH feeling rather uneasy and too dissatisfied for my liking.
The main reason for this is that too much of CRASH is images. While they are filmed beautifully and expertly, the large absence of a plot structure fails to deliver on the power these images could have provoked. While the high prevalence of sex scenes may cater for the horndogs of the audience, there isn't enough meat in the story to justify their multitude and to satisfy the more cerebral among us.
The strength of CRASH was the effective portrayal of the dark and forbidding world the characters inhabit. Most scenes take place at night with the daytime scenes clouded with atmospheric grime from factors such as the heavy traffic, among the few external intrusions in this insular lifestyle. Music plays a subtly important role here, its occasional infusion is used for the more critical scenes. CRASH is quite a mixed bag. It's images and cinematography are second-to-none and cast a uniquely nightmarish and decadent light on one of society's more ordinary pastimes. However, the rather thin plot provides no support to effectively convey the power of these images. This especially renders many of the sex scenes superfluous and redundant. While director David Cronenberg has the elements to weave a truly compelling and unique tale, the combined effort doesn't quite gel together properly.
Rating: 61%
A copy of this review will appear at my movie review page at http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~dvsin/Movies
Deepak
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews