This week, I finally got to see one of those art house productions that was released in the mid-1990s amid much controversy. David Cronenberg’s Crash, based on J. G. Ballard’s eponymous novel, neatly split movie critics in two camps – the ‘what on earth is this trash and how did it make it to the big screen’ camp and the ‘this is pure art, beautiful in its daring approach and originality’ one.
Sadly, by the end of the movie – that I could barely finish, in all honesty – I had placed myself firmly within the ‘what on earth’ camp.
Cronenberg is as weird as they come, but he has been responsible for a couple of masterpieces, if you like his style. I thoroughly enjoyed The Fly (eating right before, during or after is not recommended), A History of Violence and A Dangerous Method.
Cronenberg’s works tend to get nominated for various awards, and I can see why. As director, he has a beautifully original vision. His work is invariably disturbing, but somehow always finds redemption.
This isn’t true of Crash, however. To put it briefly, the film centres around a group of people with a very strange fetish – they get sexually excited by car crashes. Being in one, witnessing one, causing one... it does take all sorts, doesn’t it?
The problem I found with the movie is not the subject matter itself but the approach. Cronenberg normalises this behaviour, several deaths are treated very casually and there is barely a plotline to keep the movie together – the whole 100 minutes are a string of car crashes and transgressive sexual encounters.
In all fairness, I haven’t read Ballard’s novel, so I’m not sure whether the shallowness of the end result is to be placed at Cronenberg’s or at Ballard’s door.
However, according to most literary papers, Ballard intended his book to serve as a cautionary tale – Cronenberg’s movie totally ditches this aspect. The production’s artistic merits do not make up for the amorality, the gratuitous sex and the masochistic violence.
The movie, of course, initiated a whole discussion chez Depares. At which point does an art house movie cross the line and become pointless drivel?
There have been other, equally explicit productions that do not offend in the same way Crash does. Take David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, which got him an Academy Award nomination for Best Director in 1986.
It is controversial, surely, but it doesn’t stop there. It also has a multi-layered storyline, replete with symbolism and continued breaking ground with Lynch’s visual style and his way of combining neo-noir elements with surrealism. And, of course, there is the redemption aspect that makes all the difference.
At which point does an art house movie cross the line and become pointless drivel?
Another such movie that springs to mind is The Skin I Live In. Different style and genre, but still pushing boundaries by focusing on the depravities man is capable of and by not being afraid to show these explicitly.
How refreshingly different, however, the way director Pedro Almódovar develops these themes, at no time leaving us in any doubt about the moral angle his movie is taking.
These are but two examples of directors who didn’t stop at the controversy, but also injected their works with substance.
I guess the line between artistry and self-indulgence is a very fine one. It is a line that Cronenberg definitely crossed in Crash.
rdepares@timesofmalta.com