Spoiler Warning: This discussion has very few spoilers: some set up from the first act, a general idea of the narrative at hand.
"They bury the dead so quickly. They should leave them lying around for months."
David Cronenberg had his new film announced for Cannes, and being something of a novice in the Canadian's work - I thought Crash would be a good place to become a bit more acquainted with him. It certainly dropped me into the deep end, mixing wild eroticism with grievous bodily harm in ways I've never considered before.
I knew from the start what I was getting into when the very first frames of the film show a woman pressing her nipple up against the cold metal of a plane and back-to-back sex scenes. It never eases up from that moment, honestly. It's either intense sexual encounters or frightening recreations of celebrity deaths by motor vehicle. It is a strange yet mesmerising collision of flesh and steel, man and machine, nature and production. The score heightens so much of the action exploring these themes and matches the uneasy environment that Cronenberg achieves so effectively.
I suppose my biggest problem with the film is an intentional choice that just didn't work much for me. When you consider that Crash is a 100-minute movie, it doesn't have much desire to move forward. The film often sits idle and discards its impetus for a much slower scene between its leading ensemble. It's clearly Cronenberg focusing more on his characters and ideas than how those may fit into a traditional narrative. I would argue it works about as much as it doesn't; more than anything I admire the approach. Speaking of the ensemble, everyone is fantastic, but it is Elias Koteas and Deborah Kara Unger that steal every scene.
I've never seen anything quite like Crash before barring maybe the first act of Titane and that is not a very clear cut comparison, even then. This is so weird that I still don't quite know where I fall on it; I appreciate the very frank and (for lack of a better word) horny form of storytelling that Cronenberg adopts here with his constant nervous sexual fiddling, and bodily fluids on show, though.
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