Andrew Worsdale
THIS Friday sees the South African release of Crash, a movie so controversial it has not yet been News, features, released in the United States or the other services United Kingdom. Local distributors Nu-Metro are leading the international market with computing their bid to release the film completely uncut, but with a “no-under 18” (sex, nudity, violence) restriction, in limited cinemas across the country.
Nu Metro’s decision was taken with extreme caution in the light of the fact that, three months since its award-winning premiere at the Cannes film festival, the film has yet to find a distributor in Britain. In addition, its American distributor, Fine Line, has put its release on hold until early next year after receiving an NC-17 rating from the Motion Picture Association of America. The harshness of the rating means that, as in the past, a portion of America’s media will refuse to place advertising for the film.
Directed by Canadian David Cronenberg and based on a 1973 novel by British science fiction writer JG Ballard, Crash, which tells the tale of an underground cult which derives erotic pleasure from car crashes, created controversy from the outset. The film won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes but only after the jury was split down the middle and, after even lengthy discussion, remained divided. Eventually, the jury chair, Francis Ford Coppola, swayed the decision to give the award with his own vote.
Reacting to Britain’s refusal to release the film, Ballard has lashed out at distributors for displaying “timidity and triviality”.
And, in the latest issue of Sight and Sound, a leading British film magazine, editor Philip Dodd says, “To deny [Crash] will be to risk denying space for a whole range of ‘difficult’ movies, in which case Britain peculiar or not will be a much less interesting place.”
The film-maker himself is far more direct, quoted on his home-page on the Internet as saying, “Censors tend to do what only psychotics do … they confuse reality with illusion.”
The realities of the South African release will only be clear after this weekend.