Dec 22, 2020 Web Exclusive By Jason Wilson
Sex and car crashes is such a reductive and meaningless way to characterize David Cronenberg’s
Crash, but it’s understandable why such a description would ultimately be how such a movie is sold to the public. It’s the promise of something taboo and dangerous, and while the movie most certainly is those things it doesn’t go about it in the way that you may expect.
Crash is cold and sterile. It’s erotic without being sensual. The sex is almost always presented as mechanical and joyless. Thrilling, yes, but automatic and machine-like even when certain boundaries of inhibition are eroded. James Ballard (James Spader) and his wife Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger) have affairs and relay the details to one another during their own sexual encounters. It’s not that they’re necessarily dissatisfied with one another, it’s that sex has simply lost its luster. James breaks his leg in a car crash that sends another man fatally t
Blu-ray: Crash
by Demetrios MatheouSunday, 20 December 2020
Strapping in: James Spader and Holly Hunter in Crash
Crash, David Cronenberg’s dazzling, daring, disturbing adaptation of JG Ballard’s novel about car crashes and sex is one of the most infamous of all cinema cause celebres.
Crash, David Cronenberg’s dazzling, daring, disturbing adaptation of JG Ballard’s novel about car crashes and sex is one of the most infamous of all cinema cause celebres.
The film s premiere in Cannes in 1996 caused an extraordinary ballyhoo, with then
Evening Standard critic Alexander Walker writing a review with the headline a movie beyond the bounds of depravity and jury president Francis Coppola declining to join his fellow jury members in awarding the film a special jury prize.