If you’ve ever been in a nasty car accident, you’ve probably had this moment: lying awake at night, staring at the ceiling, trying, even years after the fact, to recollect exactly what happened. Thinking, “If only I’d swerved this way, I might’ve avoided the crash altogether. On the other hand, if I’d swerved that way....” And your heart drops at the thought. There’s nothing quite like the collision of metal with metal to draw lines in your mind. One moment your car is running fine, the next it’s scrap. One moment your body is functioning, the next...well, best not to think about it.

A crash is a memorable, emotional experience, full of possibilities and consequences. It haunts a person, especially in the way it underscores the mutual fragility of man and machine. Both have a baseline level of functionality that can, and does, cease.

David Cronenberg’s film Crash (based on the novel by J.G. Ballard) is about a handful of haunted men and women who inhabit an abstract urban landscape. Each of them has survived an automobile accident, and each of them has been rattled in exactly the same way—they’ve become obsessed in equal measure with car crashes and with sex.

James Spader stars as James, a commercial director who kills a man in a head-on collision and simultaneously injures the dead man’s wife, a doctor played by Holly Hunter. After a chance encounter at an impound lot, James and the doctor attend a lecture by a performance artist named Vaughn (Elias Koteas)—a self-proclaimed prophet who specializes in recreating the car crashes of the rich and famous. James is fascinated by Vaughn and his theories, and he asks Vaughn to chase his wife (Deborah Kara Unger) around the freeway, just to give her a thrill. The wife digs it. Being chased and threatened feeds into her exhibitionist, thrill-seeking libido.

In between the bumper scraping and the historical reenactments, there’s a liberal dose of sexual activity. Everybody (and I mean everybody) partners up before the curtain falls in Crash. Cronenberg films the sex scenes and the wreckage of cars with the same languorous tracking shots and supple lighting, drawing a sloping, crumpled line between the tangled bodies of sexual partners and of accident victims.

It’s clear what attracted Cronenberg to Ballard’s novel. For a director famed for his obsession with the decaying human form (in films like The Fly, Rabid, Naked Lunch, and Dead Ringers), the opportunity to study sexual perversion in concert with the fractal geometry of an accident scene (with its harried emergency workers and steaming radiator grilles) is almost too tempting.

Unfortunately, the director undershoots his target. Perhaps fearing that the material is too inherently volatile, Cronenberg keeps Crash spare and restrained, with minimal dialogue and little reaction from his actors. The result is a film full of charged, compelling images, but devoid of even the most basic human emotion. That this flatness is a conscious choice by Cronenberg makes it no less bothersome. Spader, Hunter, and company are yeomen enough to lift their shirts and drop their pants at Cronenberg’s behest; the least he owes them are characters of substance.

Instead, they’re more like robots, free of any motivation save what their creator wishes them to do. What is it about crashes that turns them on, exactly? What draws them to Vaughn? Have their lives been changed, or were they always like this? The principals’ actions seem to have no meaning, and the scene-to-scene transitions in Crash leave the viewer generally befuddled as to what’s going on and who’s involved. When the end credits roll up, one wonders, why now? Why not 10 minutes earlier or 10 minutes later? Leaving aside the (probably unanswerable) question of what Cronenberg may be trying to say, what makes him even think Crash is finished?

Crash has stirred up controversy for its subject matter and its NC-17 rating, but frankly, I doubt any but the most rigid prude would feel more than mild disquiet over Cronenberg’s clinical approach. If he’d gotten inside the heads of those who’ve approached the boundary of death and returned, or tried to understand why they might feel the need to mock the experience by turning it into sexual fantasy—if he’d dared to make an exciting movie about how death can inspire sex—Crash might’ve been truly shocking. Instead, it’s hard to imagine anyone but David Cronenberg lying awake at night, staring at the ceiling, thinking about Crash.—Noel Murray

This Boy’s Life

A gruff but lovable bachelor whose selfish ways are changed by a 6-year-old boy—only chugging a quart of Hai Karate could induce vomiting faster than the synopsis of Kolya, the Czech import that won this year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Film. The movie, however, is much more enjoyable (and much less cloying) than its plot would suggest—thanks largely to the roguish, melancholy charisma of Zdenek Sverak as Frantisek Louka, a former symphony cellist living in disgrace in Prague in 1989 during the waning days of Russian occupation.

An aging, unapologetic womanizer, Louka spends his days playing funeral gigs at a state crematorium and seducing married colleagues. His nights are spent alone. Through a series of disasters, including a hastily arranged marriage, Louka winds up stuck with Kolya (Andrej Chalimon), a wide-eyed little Russian boy left without any other family. Louka tries unsuccessfully to get rid of the boy, but the lonely bachelor eventually warms to the child—just as the whims of the state threaten to take the boy away.

In lesser hands, this could’ve been excruciating—a Slavic Little Miss Marker. But the director, Jan Sverak (the son of Zdenek, who scripted), has a rude, healthy streak of mischief, especially where sex and music intersect. He also keeps us aware of the world around Kolya and Louka: not just the arbitrary shifts of bureaucratic and military power in the background—perpetual nuisances that flare up every so often like a toothache—but also the fleeting details of city life. The camera is always willing to shift a bit to catch sight of a pigeon lighting on a windowsill, or of a street sign depicting a man leading a child. The story is conventional; the sense of place, character, and life under a stifling bureaucracy is not.

Kolya avoids TV-movie sappiness by staying true to its characters. Louka’s impatience with the child is harsh, and the little boy is as exasperating at times as any desperate, unhappy child would be. The faults of both are believable, and so is their eventual bonding. Kolya doesn’t play power chords on our heartstrings: It settles for lovely, muted notes of grace and humanity in Zdenek Sverak’s badger-like face and in little Andrej Chalimon’s curious, alert expressions. The movie, like Kolya, wins our affection by not begging for it.—Jim Ridley