Cronenberg, a Canadian, has been the thinking fiend’s horror director with films like ““Scanners,’’ ““The Fly’’ and ““Dead Ringers.’’ In ““Crash’’ (based on J. G. Ballard’s 1973 novel), he’s made the hydrogen bomb of shock movies. Its opening scene shows Catherine Ballard (Deborah Unger) rubbing her bare breast against an airplane’s fuselage. That’s sex. Catherine’s husband, James (James Spader), is in a terrible car crash that kills the husband of Dr. Helen Remington (Holly Hunter). That’s death. James and Helen, recovering from their injuries, have carnal congress in a car. That’s sex/death. They get involved with Vaughan (Elias Koteas), a ““scientist’’ who stages re-enactments of ““celebrity car crashes’’ (James Dean, Jayne Mansfield) for a cult of crash obsessives, including Gabrielle (Rosanna Arquette), who wears leg braces and a slutskirt.
““Crash’’ has no plot to speak of. It’s a cinematic tone poem of collisions and coitus. James, Catherine, Helen, Vaughan and Gabrielle engage in every possible pairing, hetero and homo. It’s the apotheosis of auto eroticism. And, being the work of Cronenberg, it’s deadly serious. Cronenberg has a millennial vision of a transformed sexuality that bears the paradoxical possibilities of death and love. He’s a master of seductive visuals and editing. He can be both compelling and pretentious. For all the blood and bodies, the film is cold, and the hushed solemnity of its dialogue verges on self-parody, despite what can only be called a courageous cast.
““Crash’’ will disturb many viewers, not so much with its sexual explicitness but with its linkage of sexual gratification with the near-death experience of car crashes. Ted Turner, whose Fine Line Features is releasing ““Crash’’ in the United States, at first balked at the movie but later relented. The film, which cost $9 million, has made $18 million outside the United States and was chosen best picture of 1996 by the French cinephile bible Cahiers du CinEma. Bernardo Bertolucci calls it ““a religious masterpiece.’’ But Cronenberg’s agent told him, ““Do not do this movie. It will end your career.''
Cronenberg deserves the Cannes prize for audacity (even though he wasn’t audacious enough to break the line on male frontal nudity). He says he’s grateful to Holly Hunter, who went after Cronenberg just as she went after Jane Campion for the erotically charged ““The Piano’’ (which won her an Oscar). Some Cannes jurors worried about copycat crashes. ““This film has been seen by 5 million people, and the traffic statistics have remained constant,’’ says Cronenberg. As for a breakout of sex in cars, he says, ““I’d like to take credit for that, but I can’t. There was a whole generation spawned in the back seats of Fords.''
““Sick’’ and ““Kissed’’ are more shocking than ““Crash’’ but quieter. ““Sick’’ tells the story of Bob Flanagan, a performance artist who suffered from cystic fibrosis and died last year at the age of 43. Director Kirby Dick fashions an unblinking biography of ““supermasochist’’ Flanagan. Audiences will not be unblinking: the scenes of self-mutilation are for strong eyes and stomachs only. These scenes are relieved by others in which Flanagan does hilarious riffs on the world of S&M. One scene outshocks one of the most famous scenes in movies, the slitting of an eyeball in Luis BuNuel’s surrealist classic, ““Chien Andalou.’’ But ““Sick’’ is real, a compassionate account of perversion as a tragicomic kind of salvation.
““Kissed,’’ a first feature by Canadian Lynne Stopkewich, does the impossible, treating necrophilia with delicacy and tenderness. Molly Parker, as a woman who becomes an embalmer because she’s fascinated by death, turns another perversion into a twisted gesture toward transcendence. Stopkewich calls her film ““a first-date movie for the millennium.’’ Not as wild a date as Cronenberg’s: the couple that crashes together bashes together.
