In the lead up to the 7th Canadian Film Festival in Australia (August 2012), join us as we countdown the Top 100 Canadian Films of the past 30 years. We'll be posting one film a day leading up to Canada Day on July 1st 2012. Do you agree with our team favourites? Let us know your thoughts!
J. G. Ballard - the writer upon whose novel Cronenberg’s traffic-accident-bonk-fest Crash is based - is obsessed with deviance in modern society, particularly with comfortable middle class Westerners seeking excitement and release in criminality. In Crash Ballard, true to form, takes an obscure sexual fetish, symphorophilia – sexual arousal created by staging and watching accidents or disasters – and pushes it as far as it will go.
Add Ballard’s taste for sci fi and post-Freudian sexual psychology to David Cronenberg’s love for depicting extreme body modifications and brutal sudden violence, and you have a hell of a film. At this point I should mention that Crash has a lot of sex. I mean a lot of sex – it opens with shagging and pretty much continues in that (throbbing) vein the whole way through. Crash has so much sex that it received only limited releases in the UK and Australia, and the American release was tagged, ‘The most controversial film in years’. And yet it’s not an erotic film – the characters are deliberately detached and impossible to empathise with (unless you get off on weird scars and emotionless sex).
Toronto film director James Ballard (played by James Spader) has a dispassionate open relationship with his wife Catherine (played by statuesque ice queen Deborah Kara Unger). After Ballard is involved in a car accident, shattering his leg and killing the male driver of the other car, he meets the wife of the dead man in hospital (Dr Helen Remington, played by Holly Hunter) and they start an affair based around humping in cars. Through Remington, Ballard meets car crash obsessive Vaughan, played with gurning, slobbering glee by Elias Koteas and looking like a scarred Tarantino at the end of a week-long bender.
Vaughan is undertaking an experiment in a “benevolent psychopathology” in which car crashes are a “fertilising rather than a destructive event, mediating the sexuality of those who have died with an intensity that's impossible in any other form." In other words, smashing cars into each other makes him wet. Ballard, his wife Catherine and Remington join up with Vaughan and his rag-tag group of shattered beauties, and embark on a series of adulterous, poly-sexual adventures based around cars and car crashes – heading inexorably towards the ultimate orgasmic release of death.
The actors all play it very deadpan – the only character who seems to be emotionally engaged in what they’re doing is Vaughan. They’re completely disconnected, going through the motions of seeking pleasure up to its final, terminal, savage conclusion. Their wounds are old and mannequin-like, and the film’s flat, dark, stylised intensity, laced with Howard Shore’s mutated, metallic score, alienates the viewer, forcing you to step back from the explicit spectacle and question the motivations behind the characters’ single-minded self-destructiveness, as well as the ways in which we fetishise cars and car culture in the modern world.
Plus, there’s the whole scene where Ballard has (physically confounding) sex with a labia-shaped scar on the back of a crash-lover’s leg (can’t review Crash and not mention that). You’ll never look at a leg brace the same way again.
- Nick Jarvis
“It's about the human mind, about the way we grow enslaved by the particular things that turn us on, and forgive ourselves our trespasses.” – Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times
To see the other films in the countdown so far, click here.