Round and Round

Crash: David Cronenberg’s best film is also a great example of when the movie is better than the book. J. G. Ballard provides a fine outline, but his 1973 novel is at once too flowery and too vulgar, an antiseptic and violent erotic novel that never once arouses or becomes erotic. Reading it, you’re bogged down by Ballard’s distinctly English (and unnecessary) flourishes, like describing a windshield shattering as “a death confetti.” Thankfully he was a team player when someone finally made Crash into a movie; at the premiere press conference in Cannes 1996, Ballard felt confident they “were home and dry” once Cronenberg and producer Jeremy Thomas signed on. The latter also produced Bad Timing, one of the other major cinema masterpieces about sex, violence, and men and women.

Cronenberg’s Crash is largely faithful to the book, besides the ending that he added; James Spader and Deborah Kara Unger, drifting apart in their marriage, are finally reconciled once Unger has her first car crash. “How are you?” he asks. “I think I’m okay,” she says. He brushes her hair, puts his hand to her face. “Maybe next time.” They kiss, and begin to make love on a grassy knoll beside Unger’s wrecked, but not totaled, car.

The premise is familiar now, even if you haven’t seen the movie or read the book: sex and car crashes. Sex and car crashes. SEX AND CAR CRASHES—the poster screams it, the movie screams it, until you can’t see anything else. As a metaphor for late capitalist alienation and the often volatile dynamics between men and women, Crash is in a class of its own. It’s not the film’s highest achievement, but it’s remarkable when you have a character fucking another’s open leg wound, and the packed Thursday night audience doesn’t giggle. Spader’s blank resting face got the most laughs, but Crash, like any great or even partly successful movie, played the audience, not the other way around. It’s not all just some dumb joke, like Showgirls, which again, is AMAZING given the subject matter.

Journey to Italy: Three-quarters of a century on, it hardly seems “scandalous” that a major director would leave his wife for his latest leading lady; Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman broke the seal, and Bergman was one of the few actors of her time forced into exile not because of the Red Scare, but a moral panic. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton would continue the tradition and, by the time of their second marriage and divorce in the mid-1970s, “living in sin” was on its way out as judgment, common sense, and even as a recognizable phrase. Trails would persist through the turn of the century, but not much longer, if that. Fortunately for Bergman—and the world—she continued to make films overseas. Like Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles, Bergman remained a European refugee for the rest of her career, reappearing in American movies only in… the mid-1970s, in Sidney Lumet’s Murder on the Orient Express. In 1978, one year after Rossellini’s death, she collaborated with Ingmar Bergman for the first and only time in the mother/daughter artist drama Autumn Sonata; by 1982, she was dead.

Journey to Italy was the couple’s fourth collaboration, after Stromboli, Europe ’51, and a segment in the omnibus film We, the Women. It was on the set of Stromboli that Rossellini and Bergman began their affair; just as the film was being released in America, their daughter, Isabella, was born. Stromboli bombed, and, still scandalized three years later, Rossellini and his producers couldn’t find an American distributor for Journey to Italy for nearly two years, despite the fact that it was filmed in English with A-list actors. George Sanders stars alongside Bergman as one half of a vaguely dissatisfied English couple on vacation in Italy. They wander around the city, their hotel, and other potential lovers; bloated with the kind of ennui that would characterize Michelangelo Antonioni’s early-1960s trilogy, they near divorce, but, after getting caught in a minor mob stampede, both of them realize with bracing clarity that, in fact, they love each other and should stay together.

You can see what Antonioni and especially the French New Wave hooked onto: characters as vessels, “people” who remain largely unknown to us; the tendency to linger and let shots run longer than you expect; the camera’s fascination with faces and architecture above all else. Certain aspects of Journey to Italy remain striking, but it’s more interesting today as a predecessor to 1960s and 1970s European art cinema, and the metatextual relationship between Bergman, Rossellini, and Sanders. Given how loose the production was—Sanders claims in his memoir that the dialogue was largely written on the day—it’s hard to imagine Sanders not taking some cues from his director and his marriage, if only for lack of time, not imagination.

—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @MonicaQuibbits