David Cronenberg
Crash

The opening scene, in which an excited and exciting Catherine Ballard (a stunning woman named Debora Kara Hunger) sensually presses her nipple against the cold metal of a small aircraft in a deserted hangar, is revealing of what "Crash," David Cronenberg's absolute masterpiece, will be.

When I saw the film in the cinema, I remember that while my friends alternated between hearty laughter and mocking comments (salty semen? Hahaha... but what salinity level does your seed have? Sweet and sour, another would reply, your girlfriend told me... hahaha) and expressions of disgust at the sight of licking scars, consequences of car accidents, which the protagonists so loved to do, and especially at the scene where Vaughan (Elias Koteas) and James Ballard (James Spader) decide to have a homosexual encounter in the metal alcove, deformed by impacts and smelling of Vaughan's semen, the same car in which Vaughan had tasted (or, to better put it, devoured judging by the marks on his body) Ballard's wife a short time before, I thought the film had achieved its purpose.

The continuous and increasingly extravagant sex scenes enacted by the characters in "Crash" are, in reality, threesomes, in which the car seems almost to participate in the lovemaking until it merges carnally with the protagonists. The orgasm is not reached conventionally but by taking the union that can exist between cold steel and the warmth of the human body to its extreme consequences, as can only occur through a car accident.

Apart from the usual aspects that characterize this as with other films by the Canadian director (the photography poor in color, the Leopardian pessimism, the obsession with clinical environments and flesh mutations), "Crash" seems to have something more, because it explicitly realizes the intimate desire for sexual cravings present in all of us, stripping away human inhibitions and telling traditional sexual morality to go to hell, just as it has been handed down to us by Catholic doctrine.

Perhaps this aspect, although the most conspicuous, is not the main one (I can already hear the critics accusing me of superficiality because the real meaning of the film is... etc. etc.). But, in the end, every time I watch "Crash," I am so excited that the only thing I think about is the moment when I will engage in my sexual relationship which, unlike the protagonists of "Crash," is usual and monogamous.

What can I say, I am still a victim of the old legacy according to which the girl you take to bed must always be the same when love is involved.