I wanted to like David Cronenberg’s CRASH. I really did. But it didn’t give me anything to hold on to.
The film is ostensibly about a sexually adventurous couple who enter the world of automobile crash fetishisation (Note: As far as I’m aware, so such world actually exists. But the internet is a big place. It could be out there somewhere.). It’s really about compulsion and the proper location of boundaries on sexual experience. That makes it interesting, but it fails to be engaging because its characters are too remote, its music is too remote, and even its photography is too remote.
All that remoteness makes CRASH a cold, dull experience. It’s like reading an encyclopedia article on sexuality. All the words are there, but it fails to capture the essence of the subject. At no time in the course of the film did I feel like I was watching real people have real experiences or speaking in real ways. At no time did my pulse quicken or eyes dilate. CRASH is an exercise in observation, and observe it does, but it’s more science than art. Had the film given me even one character to whom I could relate, one situation that I could even tenuously connect to my life, it might have engaged me more thoroughly.
As it was, I had to will myself to power through to the end. What a disappointment.
