Crash is a movie which is constructed upon a brilliant premise. About forty minutes in, Elias Koteas’ mysterious and charismatic psychopath introduces a staging of James Dean’s fatal crash, using identical cars, which actually collide. The world of the movie and technology fused in a single moment. The love of speed, which has driven the twentieth century, impaled on the steering wheel of the fixed punctum of the cinema frame. This moment seems to connect Hollywood with Marinetti’s Futurism, with Ducournau’s Titane, the automobile as the death drive of progress. The fact that the characters all want to have sex in cars, all the time, the cars being their potential murderers, only exacerbates the Freudian connotations where sex and death are all part of the same turbulent psychological crisis towards which modernity, and us, its guests, is constantly accelerating.
Having reached this point, 45 minutes into the film, it then feels as though Cronenberg wasn’t entirely sure where to go next. The tension that is laced into the film like a corset in the opening, a place where anything might happens, starts to slip as the characters settle into a playful Schnitzler-esque ronde, seeking to either screw or kill one another in the next car accident they can provoke. The film seems to decelerate rather than accelerate, and the brilliance of the opening forty five minutes becomes a tail light moving out of range, speeding away into a parallel film in another dimension, a dimension Cronenberg’s film would die to crash through to, if only it hadn’t lost the map.
No comments:
Post a Comment