Crash
What the fuck, literally! This is pure Cronenberg weirdness wrapped around sexually charged arthouse. There’s less talking than other films, but sometimes it is too much.
Ballard, a movie producer (just to up the ante into meta-commentary stuff) drives recklessly and crashes his car, but he survives. This bring him to the attention of weirdos that get off on car accidents. Her wife is one of those, but their relationship was weirder before that. Those weirdos reenact famous car accidents, like the deaths of James Dean and Jayne Mansfield. The spiritual leader drives a banged up Lincoln Continental, just like the one JFK was riding when his brains turned to mush.
That’s basically the film. He meets several people involved with the movement, fucks several of them, as does his wife. As simple reenactments get routine, they go for the hardcore stuff: jerking off at freeway accidents in situ, and finally ramming their cars into one another and provoking crashes on purpose.
It makes about as much sense in context, which is none. The cast is not that star studded: a very young Spader, the waitress from The Game, one of the Arquettes. Still better than the other Crash.
I can see why Titane was compared to this, but this has even less plot. It’s mostly visually stunning imagery and moanings, with a soft Howard Shore soundtrack. Titane has characters and shit.
The book where this was based on must be even crazier. The author was apparently referred to as “beyond psychiatric help”, I can see where they are coming from. I like what the writer of actual pornos Roger Ebert has to say:
It’s like a porno movie made by a computer: It downloads gigabytes of information about sex, it discovers our love affair with cars, and it combines them in a mistaken algorithm.
Good old ChatGPT.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.