In Toronto, a most interesting group of people live for whom car accidents replace Viagra. Going - crashing - fucking. The delights of this lesson were discovered by James (Spader), who has trouble with his wife (Kara Anger). They live together and periodically make love, but it's all somehow cold. They also regularly cheat on each other. So they lived until James crashed into a doctor's car in full swing with Gestapo manners (repainted Hunter brown-haired). In the process, her husband was sent to the other world, but oh well. Doctors with James will begin an affair. And then they will meet Vaughn (Koteas), the cutest person with a bouquet of scars. He also shares a passion for accidents and, moreover, he recreates them himself. Together, they will endlessly mumble in car interiors on leather seats.
Yes, in form it is pornography. But the overall effect is striking. "Catastrophe", like any outstanding work of art, was initially doomed to failure - too frankly, too rude, too incomprehensible. Cronenberg in his desire to unleash the potential of sexual deviations slightly went too far, and for this he was stunned. The scandal that happened in Cannes in the 96th is probably comparable only with another no less high-profile - passions according to Bertolucci in the 72nd. Only the Italian amusement never dreamed of what the Canadian pervert had come up with.
Cronenberg's steel and chrome live their own lives - never before have cars looked so erotic. His fantasies are like the fantasies of a cheap tabloid erotomaniac, except there is a huge one: Cronenberg, a legendary director, a director with (at that time) thirty years of experience, who has at his disposal Hollywood actors (and even Oscar-winning Hunter), shot by no means cheap software porn. "Catastrophe" is absolutely indescribable in words, it exists in its own separate, clogged little world, access to which everyone can get and at the same time no one can. Here death does not cost anything - everyone unconsciously wants it. There is no and cannot be love, and people change partners in promiscuous orgies on wheels. They are sufferingly fucked - on crutches and without, in a cast, with broken limbs - in search of truth. They are us. And we are them.