CRASH (49) (59 - second viewing)

Directed by: David Cronenberg

Starring: James Spader, Elias Koteas, Holly Hunter

The Pitch: After being involved in a road accident, James Ballard falls in with a shadowy group who are turned on by car-crashes.

Theo Sez: A RED DESERT for the 90s, sharing with Antonioni's opus of 60s alienation both a velvety sense of visual style and a pace to remind us that the word "ennui" means both mental / spiritual exhaustion and just plain boredom. After a hypnotically good first half-hour - which says pretty much all there is to say on its characters' zoned-out weariness, as well as finding something chilling and (yes) dramatic in the image of car-glutted freeways - it just stops, turning into an ever more desultory series of grindingly dreary scenes, people sleepwalking through dimly-lit settings and clambering pointlessly on top of other people. Academics have, predictably, praised its perversity ("our addiction to forward motion that Cronenberg treats so trenchantly," chirps Film Comment), but then championing distinctive-but-basically-tedious movies is what makes them academics ; the furore it has raised is more surprising (it's strangely heartening to see a pretentious art movie causing so much fuss). The point is presumably the same as it was for THE SEASHELL AND THE CLERGYMAN 70 years ago, banned in Britain for being "so cryptic as to be almost meaningless. If there is a meaning, it is doubtless objectionable." Apparently the 90s aren't quite as modern, let alone post-modern, as Cronenberg would like to think.

Second viewing (with a more liberal audience, in a more luxurious cinema emphasising the visual atmospherics) is, unexpectedly, a very different experience : the film seems somehow less po-faced, less a social statement and more a wonderfully twisted comedy. Quite apart from the overtly comic bits (like the nervous car salesman who accidentally tears off Rosanna Arquette's artificial leg), it seems clear that the characters aren't shorthand for an emotionally dead society but more a lost tribe of asocial obsessives (their anti-safety, hence anti-society bent is almost incidental - they could be lepidopterists for all the difference it would make) whom Cronenberg views with a gleeful how-far-can-you-go fascination : Ballard's sly question, "So - would you see the Kennedy assassination as a special kind of car crash?", is typical of the director's deadpan-satirical approach. Still overstretched of course, still terribly slow - without even the climactic leap to another realm that makes Jarmusch's (surprisingly similar) DEAD MAN so very special - and I still can't quite bring myself to recommend it ; but maybe on third viewing...