When the late lamented Moving Pictures considered why Britain’s most important post-war writer had been virtually ignored by the medium, controversial Canuck David Cronenberg popped up to sketch in his plans for techno-sex masterpiece, Crash. His understanding of JG Ballard’s text, he explained, was more instinctive than intellectual. Half a decade and a firestorm of righteous knee-jerking later the results smash onto our screens to prove him right.

Let us establish some facts. Despite the best paranoid hysterics of Tookey and Walker to prove otherwise, to see Crash is not to see Deep Throat reimagined for the abattoir. Rather, it is a chilly, cerebral, almost forensic examination of extreme psychopathology. Car crashes themselves are sparse and staged with short, essentially realistic brutality. No slo-mo, no triple rolls, and definitely no explosions. The film jerks our attentions by not performing to its Hollywood template.

Sex, on the other hand, is frequent, prolonged and explicit. This is no Basic Instinct freeze-frame tease. Ballard’s seminal (sic) novel is self-proclaimed pornography - ‘the most political form of fiction’ - and any film thereof inevitably bears a heavy responsibility. The genius of Cronenberg’s film is to understand and translate those dynamics to the screen in such a way that it remains ‘acceptable’ without sacrificing its steely soul. (Of course, in the bastion of enlightenment that is the United Kingdom, even this compromise is largely unwelcome).

The secret of Cronenberg’s success lies, surely, in his not repeating the central flaw of the heavily misunderstood Naked Lunch. There he took the disparate ‘routines’ of Burroughs and straightened them as narrative, allowing him to place an essentially unfilmable work within loose genre definitions. The results were frequently remarkable, hardly marketable, and ultimately unsatisfying as Burroughs.

To read Ballard’s book is to realise that, for all it has chapters and characters, it remains essentially a 171-page prose poem meditating the ‘nightmare marriage of sex and technology’. Crash all but abandons plot: everything is permitted.

Toronto, Canada. James Ballard (James Spader) and Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger) use an open marriage to keep their relationship alive. One day James is involved in a head-on collision in which a man is catapulted through his windshield. Recovering in hospital he meets the dead man’s wife Helen (Holly Hunter, excellent) and a supposed medical photographer, Vaughan (Elias Koteas). On release, he realises that this enigmatic ‘hoodlum scientist’ is actually the leader of a mysterious cabal of crash victims dedicated to divining a new form of evolution through auto-motive destruction: ‘a fertilising rather than destructive event.’

Like the novel this is all so much framework onto which the film’s sexual flesh is layered. For apart from the most basic of information - James makes commercials, Catherine takes flying lessons (very Ballard) - we recognise the characters only through their erotica. These people don’t eat, sleep, wash, shit. They fuck and drive. And when they are not fucking or driving it dominates their conversation.

Sex, therefore, becomes not only integral to the plot, but is the plot. The film disturbs wannabe moralists precisely because it places everything outside of accepted moral frameworks. It operates in the crepuscular netherworld of pornography itself - the only place where consecutive sex scenes have any narrative strength. For example, the film opens with three distinct scenes of intercourse: Catherine and her suitor in a cavernous hanger, deliberately placing her right breast on the wing of a light aircraft, licking the metal as she is herself licked; James in an untidy, unsatisfying desktop fuck with his ‘camera girl’; and recounting their activities, this married couple coupling on their balcony as the Toronto traffic surges below. The only other film that operates in a comparable arena is surely the 1976 French/Japanese classic Ai No Corrida, but even there director Nagisha Oshima allowed himself a luxury that Cronenberg is denied: all the sex in Crash is simulated.

This is potentially the faultline that could steer any movie adaptation into the wall. On the page the author’s sole restriction is imagination. On screen (commercially at least) the proposition is a little harder. But that said, Crash is about as explicit - of female nudity, at least - as ‘mainstream’ cinema gets. As per usual, the men get to keep it all in, but as the director says, he wants the film to be about the act, not compromised by the size of James Spader’s cock. The true genius (yes, that word again) of Cronenberg’s approach is to use limitation to advantage.

The book is a first person account; we are lead through with James Ballard as guide. Film, inevitably, is more objective (a dilemma Naked Lunch, fatally, never resolved) and thus as both writer and director Cronenberg cannot allow us into the distancing psychopathology of his characters through interior monologue. Instead, he adapts the depiction of the sex act itself to provide the demanded perspective. Almost without exception penetration is affected from the rear, allowing these individuals to be this intimate without visual contact. The results, rather like the staging of successive sex scenes, are typical of the movie’s disconnected aggression.

It’s opponents, inevitably unbalanced by the sexual narrative, then turn their fire on the picture’s supposed violence. But, as the director makes clear, there are no guns, no knives in the film, and all the sex is consensual. In a curious way, this most amoral of films is quite furiously PC.

This is also Cronenberg’s most exterior movie, both literally and metaphorically. It makes for an intriguing companion piece to Dead Ringers - a film so clinical and suffocatingly interior that our eventual escape to the real world is dizzying. Here something similar happens whenever we move inside.

At the same time, our engagement is entirely surface: we have no real emotional investment. We follow events and listen to dialogue lifted heavily from the novel, but how much do we penetrate the purpose of what we see? Early on Vaughan explains his commission as the union of sex and technology. Later, almost as though Cronenberg is having fun at his own expense, he has Vaughan telling Ballard that is nothing but ‘a crude sci-fi concept that floats on the surface’.

There is a bruised joke buried in there somewhere. The film is riddled with them - a twisted, almost subliminal black humour that says to us that it really is okay to laugh. The repetition of a line from the start of the film in its breathless climax (five minutes of some of the most exhilarating cinema you’ll ever see) prompts a bleak chuckle from its audience. Elsewhere it’s almost up-front, like when Ballard and Vaughan pick up an airport hooker, the sign behind admonishing, DO NO ENTER.

Visually this is Cronenberg’s Alphaville, a film designed to be visually hard, be it in the crushed metal of the crashes themselves, the stark concrete overpasses and car-parks, or the medical depiction of bruises and wounds. ‘Prophecy,’ says Vaughan, ‘is dirty and ragged.’ Many of its best sequences - like Koteas stalking the site of a freeway pile-up - are virtual tableau vivant, reminding us of a slightly grubby Peter Greenaway. Elsewhere the film equates the Helmut Newton-like perfection of its women and lingerie with the sleek lines of its vehicles, its understanding of the complex equation of sex, technology and death total. Versatile cinematographer Peter (Mars Attacks!) Suschitzky excels himself. The scene in which Vaughan has sex with Catherine in a carwash while hubby plays voyeur has a Lynch-like intensity of sound and colour. Sometimes soap bubbles, it seems to say, ain’t just soap bubbles.

Cronenberg achieves something of a career best in his fusing of flesh and metal with this film, be it the snazzy, scientific leg-braces bolted to Ballard after his accident, or the complex, almost sculptural examples sported by Vaughan acolyte Gabrielle (played with remarkable verve by Rosanna Arquette). She complements this bio-machinery with a serious fetish for leather. Unfortunately she also provokes the one major faux pas in this otherwise meticulously realised work.

In the novel, Ballard removes Gabrielle’ steel cages, finding himself sexually intrigued by the indentations left in her flesh. In the film, the director feels honour bound to insert a very Cronenberg Moment, crudely having Ballard sexually aroused by and subsequently entering the livid lips of a scar torn down the back of her leg. An arresting image, it lacks the subtle invention of the original.

The performances are uniformly excellent. Spader is called upon to react more than act, bringing just the right level of yuppie-clean and willing collusion to the part. He wears bruises well. The jittery Koteas proves his startling work with Egoyan to be no fluke, whether articulating on ‘the project’ or stripping to proudly exhibit his Warhol chest scars.

It’s Unger who stays with us though. Hers is a sensational performance, horrifically blank and disconnected, eyes focused away from anyone or anything whether in the throws of passion or dialogue. Few will forget as Spader enters her vigorously from behind while she goads him on to describe Vaughan:
‘Can you imagine what his anus is like? Describe it to me... Would you like to put your penis right into his anus, thrust it up his anus?’
The film mercifully doesn’t shy away from the novel’s subsequent sex scene between the two men.

These people are stars - at least, Spader and Hunter are stars - and yet any iconic status they sustain is utterly subsumed by Cronenberg’s own project. The novel is a metaphor for reinvention, with the car as the tool of revolutionary struggle. Cronenberg demands and receives a similar reinvention of his performers. You will never watch any of them in quite the same way again.

Howard Shore’s severe, dissonant soundtrack is composed almost exclusively for multiple electric guitars, finding the perfect aural accompaniment to the echoing steeliness of all those cars, all that concrete. Again Crash makes no compromises. It is cinema without seat-belts and airbags: dangerous, difficult and frequently quite brilliant. It complements rather than replaces the novel - to get the most out of Cronenberg’s images, one really needs digest Ballard’s words. The author is inordinately proud and rightly so - few writers have been filmed with even half the skill and affinity he’s offered here; all that’s missing is an empty swimming pool.

Crash is Ballard’s most personal novel and, as a self-styled and rigorously realised ‘existential romance’, has become Cronenberg’s best, most personal movie. Simple labels should perhaps be applied with caution, but from its arresting titles to the brilliantly translated denouement, this really is some kind of masterpiece.