Car wreck (film)

The film takes place in Toronto . James Ballard ( James Spader ), film producer, lost touch with his wife, Katherine ( Deborah Cara Unger ). At the very beginning of the film, it is shown how the couple cheated on each other, and later coldly make love. They are excited only when discussing the intimate details of their extramarital affairs.

Returning home from work by car at night, Ballard collides head-on with a car. A male passenger, flying out through the windshield, dies. A female driver, Dr. Helen Remington ( Holly Hunter ), the wife of a dead passenger, while trying to unfasten his seat belt, accidentally exposes his chest.

Once injured in the hospital, Ballard again meets Dr. Remington, as well as a man named Vaughn ( Elias Koteas ), who shows an increased interest in the apparatus that fixes the fracture bones of Ballard's legs and photographs it.

After treatment, Remington and Ballard begin an affair, primarily fueled by their joint experience in a car accident. Everything related to sex in their cars. Trying to understand why they are so obsessed with car accidents, they go to see Vaughan’s performance, recreating the true picture of a car accident in which James Dean died, with original cars and stunt drivers. When the police disrupt the meeting, Ballard escapes with Remington and Vaughn.

Ballard becomes one of Vaughan's followers for whom cars are a sexual fetish . They are obsessed with watching videos of testing car safety systems and taking photos of traffic accidents. Ballard sits at the wheel of a Lincoln cabriolet owned by Vaughn and rides around the city while Vaughn rents and uses the services of street prostitutes, and later Ballard's wife. In turn, Ballard has an affair with one of the members of the group, Gabrielle ( Rosanna Arquette ), a beautiful woman who has orthopedic prostheses on her feet. The film shows not only heterosexual contacts in cars. While watching videos of car crashes, Dr. Remington becomes extremely agitated and begins to touch between Ballard and Gabrielle, hinting at the inevitable triolism . Vaughn and Ballard end up having sex. Gabriel and Remington also have sex.

Although Vaughn first claims that he is interested in “restructuring the human body with modern technology,” his program actually revives the philosophy that a car accident “enriches rather than destroys, serves as a link between the dead and energy that is impossible neither in what other form. "

The film climaxes with Vaughn’s death and ends when Ballard doesn’t quite deliberately arrange for the accident his wife gets into. Car accidents like fetish and sexual experiments add variety to the life of Ballard and the characters in the film.

• James Spader - James Ballard
• Deborah Kara Anger - Katherine Ballard
• Elias Koteas - Won
• Holly Hunter - Helen Remington
• Rosanna Arquette - Gabriel
• Peter McNill - Colin Seagrave

• Director - David Cronenberg
• Screenwriter - David Cronenberg
• Operator - Peter Souszycki
• Montage - Ronald Sanders
• Set Designer - Carol Speer
• Composer - Howard Shore
• Producer - David Cronenberg

The announcement in Cannes of the awarding of the film a special prize provoked cries of protest. Over the next year, the film could not find a distributor in the United States. Ted Turner himself declared an unspoken war an “immoral” tape. In the British newspaper Daily Mail appeals were published to boycott the rental of the film in England. The director explains such a painful reaction by the fact that the film could not be pushed onto the finished shelf with a label - it was not pornography , not science fiction , and not the usual Hollywood ode to sex and violence. The “real world” shown to the viewer was completely unrealistic. According to its initial data, “Car Crash” resembled a Hollywood movie and Hollywood actors played in it, ”recalls the director. - But everything else - intonations, emotions, problems, plot, music - was foreign to Hollywood. It confused people, and they did not know how to react to it " ^[3] .

Among intellectual critics, J. Rosenbaum noted that the film about the triumph of the death drive was shot "masterfully", although it is inferior to the book ^[4] . According to the critic, the limitations of "Car Crash" are inherent in the source material, where monotonous repetitions of accidents and copulations abound, everything is built around a single basic metaphor and it is difficult for the viewer to identify with any of the characters ^[4] . The film was highly praised by J. Hoberman , who noted the melancholy mood piercing him, in which hints of unconventional, dry humor drown (when one car rides on the tail of another, it is likened to sex from behind) ^[5] . Ballard himself favorably accepted the film version of the novel and began to promote the work of Cronenberg in his homeland ^[6] .

For Cronenberg, technology, including car manufacturing, is the fruit of the human mind and a kind of natural extension of the human body ^[7] . In "Car accident" he returns to his favorite topic: how modern technology is changing a person and his sex life ^[8] . He notes that a moment has come in the history of mankind when the reproduction of a species has become possible by artificial means, without the help of sex : "We could declare a century-old moratorium on sex and the human race would not cease to exist." The director wonders about the place of sex in the new conditions ^[7] .

The “car accident” by J. Ballard, the favorite novel of the philosopher J. Baudrillard ^[9] , paints the world of mankind so alienated and saturated that communication and emotions are possible only through traumatic experience, such as an accident. In the fantasy, semi-abstract world of Ballard and Cronenberg, the vectors of thanatos and Eros coincide in a single act of intercourse through man-made technology. J. Rosenbaum notes that in the film, human skin is likened to a glamorously illuminated, fetishized car surface; the camera glides seamlessly from one to another ^[4] . How fetish cars and accidents are perceived by the “chosen ones” is a secret society like a fighting club in the novel by Palanika ^[10] .

Rewards

• 1996 - Cannes Film Festival
  • Special Jury Prize - David Cronenberg
• 1996 - Gini Award
  • Best Director - David Cronenberg
  • Best Adapted Screenplay - David Cronenberg
  • Best Cinematography - Peter Sushicki
  • Best Editing - Ronald Sanders
  • Best Sound Editing - Tom Bielic , Wayne Griffin , John Laing , Andy Malcolm , John Douglas Smith , Dale Sheldrake , David Evans
  • Golden Bobbin Award - Robert Lantosh , Jeremy Thomas , David Cronenberg
• 1998 - AVN Award
  • Best Alternative Feature Film for Adults

Nominations

• 1996 - Cannes Film Festival
  • Golden Palm Branch - David Cronenberg
• 1996 - Gini Award
  • Best Movie - David Cronenberg
  • Best Sound Engineering - Tony van den Akker , Christian T. Cook , David Lee , Dino Pigat , Lou Solyakovsky , Orest Sushko
• 1998 - Motion Picture Sound Editors
  • Golden Bobbin Award

• " Car Crash ” on the Internet Movie Database