SLOW-MOVING VIOLATION

By RICHARD CORLISS

At last May's Cannes Film Festival it won a hotly disputed prize for "originality, daring and audacity." In November it nabbed five Genies (Canada's Oscar equivalent), including one for director David Cronenberg. It also earned a chilling blast of invective from Ted Turner, boss of bosses of the film's U.S. distributor, Fine Line Features (and vice chairman of Time Warner, parent of TIME). Now Crash--from J.G. Ballard's notorious 1973 novel, and with an NC-17 warning sticker affixed--finally opens in the country that invented car culture.

Its premise is custom-made to shock: five people take their pleasure by making love in the twisted wrecks of cars. Not simple thrill seekers, these folks have turned their kink into a cult, elevated making out in the backseat to sadomasochistic levels, converted rubbernecking into a black art. They preach "the reshaping of the human body by modern technology." Their grail is James Dean's Porsche Spyder 550; their relics are photos of Jayne Mansfield's fatal collision. Kinda creepy, huh?

Fade in on a luscious blond, sleek as a vintage Corvette, who presses her breast against a car hood while an anonymous man caresses her skin as if it were rich Corinthian leather. The scene is from a film being shot by director James Ballard (James Spader), and the star is Ballard's wife Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger).

But this is just fun and games. The real show begins when Ballard's car jumps a barrier and head-ons another car; the driver is killed, but his wife, a doctor (Holly Hunter), survives. Ballard meets her at the hospital, and in a trice they are having urgent sex in an airport garage. The doctor tells of her other sexcapades in cars: "They felt like traffic accidents." She loves making love to men with scars; to her, each wound is an orifice, and auto eroticism is an aphrodisiac. It is more--a sacrament--to Vaughan (Elias Koteas), whose obsession with celebrity crashes has made him a priest of the car cult. He seeks immortality in heavy-metal scrapes with death.

Cars and sex do have things in common: acceleration, aggression, contact, combustion. Cinema, eternal celebrant of the stupid-funny car crash, is the ideal medium to anatomize America's fetishizing of the automobile. And Cronenberg is the very guy for the job. His first commercial film, Fast Company, was about stock-car racing; his brilliant remake of The Fly was a parable of love, decay and death, of man misguidedly using machinery to transform himself.

An intellectual and a sensualist, Cronenberg graces Crash with philosophical musings, acres of pretty flesh and even more penis talk than on some 8 o'clock sitcoms. For all that, Crash doesn't work. Sexual without being sexy, the film moves smoothly but slowly, like a Caddy on a revolving showroom platform. Dialogue scenes are conducted in a reverent whisper; only the brakes screech, just after a climax or before a death. Even the carnographic love play--in which each character has predictably weird sex with most of the others--is too studied. The fine actors disport themselves solemnly, like giant hood ornaments of lust.

Maybe a little careering delirium would have helped. It may seem perverse to demand that an outrageous film go still further, faster, wilder. But if it had, Crash wouldn't be the honorable chore it finally is--less a joyride than an endless traffic jam.

--By Richard Corliss