HAVING campaigned in its editorial columns for Michael Collins to be withdrawn, the Daily Telegraph threw in the towel on November 8th when Neil Jordan's film opened in Britain and Ireland: the same day, the paper turned its attention to David Cronenberg's film of J.G. Ballard's 1973 novel, Crash.
`Depraved' film to be released in Britain", declared a front-page story which quoted "one senior British critic" as describing the movie as,,"beyond the bounds of depravity.
The article went on to quote Alexander Walker, film critic of the Evening Standard in London, saying the film contained "some of the most perverse acts and theories of sexual deviance I have seen propogated in mainstream cinema - Crash, without exaggeration, will tax public tolerance and film censorship to the limits and maybe beyond."
The next day, the front page of the Daily Mail was urging in banner headlines: "Ban This Car Crash Sex Film". Virginia Bottomley, the British heritage secretary, rowed in to express her disgust for what she called an "immoral and depraved film". She had omitted to express her concerns about the film to its director, David Cronenberg, when she shared a table with him at the opening of the London Film Festival a few nights earlier.
Then again, she had not seen the film she was attacking.
Nor had the film been seen by the member of Westminster City Council who turned up on television claiming "Hollywood has gone too far".
On Wednesday, the licensing sub-committee of Westminster City Council finally saw Crash and imposed an interim prohibition on London's West End cinemas playing the film. The subcommittee will reconsider the prohibition when the British Board of Film Classification, (BBFC) delivers its decision on the film, but it retains the right to retain the ban if the BBFC gives the film an 18 certificate in its present form.
James Ferman, director of the BBFC, wants all 16 of his examiners to view the film before the board's decision is made, and he has promised to give his reply by December 6th to the film's British distributors, Columbia TriStar Films. Gerry Mulcahy, Columbia TriStar's Irish manager, said on Thursday that he intends to see Crash soon. "I will then make a recommendation as to how to handle it," he says.
He has the option of submitting the film to the censor, Sheamus Smith, or offering it to the Irish Film Centre. The IFC, as a club cinema, does not have to have films it screens passed by the censor.
Should the censor reject the film and the Film Appeals Board uphold his decision, it is unlikely the film would be offered to the IFC - last year when the IFC booked Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers for a two-month run after it had been banned by the censor, the Department of Justice threatened action should the IFC proceed with screenings of the film. The IFC withdrew the film on the day it was scheduled to open.
The fuss about Crash started at Cannes in May when the movie had its world premiere at the film festival. Hissed and booed at its Cannes press screening, it was booed again at the festival's awards ceremony, when it took a runner-up prize from a divided jury.
Cronenberg's film opens on three consecutive sex scenes - in an aircraft hanger, in the camera room of a TV studio and on the balcony of an apartment building - before one of the participants an advertising executive played by James Spader, takes to the expressway in his car.
Swerving across the road and driving against the oncoming one-way traffic, he causes a crash which kills the other driver. Soon he's back in his car, kissing the dead driver's wife (Holly Hunter) and after another near-crash, having sex with her.
The consequences involve multiple sexual groupings - among them gay and lesbian sex, voyeurism of a back-seat coupling in a car-wash, rough sex and scar fetishism - in which the other participants are the advertising executive's wife (Deborah Unger), an accident victim (Rosanna Arquette) in calliper splints, and a heavily scarred renegade scientist (Eli as Koteas).
The coldest and most clinical film to date from David Cronenberg, whose films include The Fly, Dead Ringers and Naked Lunch - and the most extreme and disturbing - Crash is as technically accomplished as we have come to expect from the gifted Canadian director. It reiterates the recurring theme in Cronenberg's work - and in virtually every movie based in the future - that the human race remains primitive despite all the technological advances of this century.
Crash has been described as auto-erotic: however, if anything, ft is anti-erotic. And mainstream multiplex audiences are much more likely to be bored than aroused or shocked by Cronenberg's harsh style.
"My movie is not remotely pornographic, because its purpose is not primarily to arouse sexually," Cronenberg said at his press conference in Cannes. "Using sex and scenes of sex as an integral part of a film is dangerous - usually movies stop for a sex scene and then continue. When people see three or four sex scenes in a row, they get confused and wonder when the movie's going to start. But the movie has started."
After the London Film Festival's screening of Crash a fortnight ago, Cronenberg defended the film, saying it is "experimental and complex, but not a social danger". He added: "I don't think somebody is going to see this film, copy it and go and look for car crashes to get off on. It has been seen by 700,000 people in France and traffic statistics have remained constant."
J.G. Ballard, who wrote the novel Crash in 1973, describes Cronenberg's film as "a great movie and one of the greatest films ever made on sexuality and violence" and as "a cautionary tale". At Cannes he said: "Although there's comparatively little sex and violence in the film, it's one of the most sexual and violent films ever made because of the explicit assumption set out in every frame that sex and violence are inherent in the experience of driving a car. It's a subject that must be addressed.
"We'd be deceiving ourselves if we censored out any imaginative response to sex and violence. That would be like censoring the news."