Film
Crash
- Director
- David Cronenberg
- Certificate
- 18
- Running Time
- 100 mins
Yes kids, the 1990s was a brilliant time to be writing about film. Virtually every week seemed to bring yet another cause celebre that caused the Easily Offended to work themselves into a lather. Who’d have predicted that youthful wokesters would pick up the baton from pearl-clutching matrons, sour radical feminists (now demonised as TERFs) and censorious conservatives in the 21st century, huh? David Cronenberg‘s adaptation of J.G. Ballard‘s 1973 novel won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes, but provoked one of the biggest barneys in the UK. It regularly wound up on the front page of the Daily Mail, whose critic Christopher Tookey managed to offend another group of people when he described it as a “sex with cripples” movie. After a long delay, the BBFC finally passed the film uncut, although several local authorities took it upon themssleves to ban it.
https://youtu.be/iuPd7_S5IoA
Anyway, as is so often the way with these things, the controversy is completely forgotten today. So much so, in fact, that this fully restored 4K reissue is of the longer, more explicit US NC-17 version, which was never shown in British cinemas. This is a cool, insidiously disturbing study of an evolving human pathology based on eroticised car crashes. The sex life of bored, alienated middle-class couple James Spader and Deborah Unger has degenerated into shagging strangers when injured Spader embarks on a hesitant relationship with Holly Hunter, the driver of the other car in a near-fatal collision, becoming drawn in to a whole new form of sexual expression. Cronenberg offers no easy point of entry or identification; instead, he forces us to accept these characters and the peripheral world they inhabit at face value. Every hetero and homosexual permutation is explored as the fixed boundaries of ‘normal’ sexuality give way to creatively ‘perverse’ fluidity. Provocative, extreme and intellectually exhilarating.
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