The Hindu Business Line : <I>Crash</I>: Love & loathing post-9/11

LET'S be clear about one thing - this is a movie to be seen at any cost. With a narrative style that reminds one of Steven Soderbergh's Traffic, Crash brings together a host of characters from diverse backdrops and shows how their lives intersect over two days, even as the best effort of each is to stick to one's own lane.

As detective Graham (Don Cheadle) observes in the opening sequence, "It's the sense of touch. In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people; people bump into you. In LA, nobody touches you. We're always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something."

The encounters showcase racial tension, the urge to kill, the onset of forgiveness, accidental murder, and murder miraculously avoided. Caused by tangible grievance; finished off by a quirk.

The story, which strings together several seemingly unconnected people into a chain of consequences, plays into the hidden desire of most urbanites to see a picture of family emerging from the isolated dots on a giant map each one actually is.

But set in post-9/11 America with its renewed reasons for racial tension and a high degree of mutual suspicion, that family is a pale version of humanity, disjointed and violent, occasionally - only occasionally - salvaging its civilised roots. You meet up at your own risk.

Once in a while the city's population of loathing strangers manages to help one another, as Ryan (Matt Dillon) the racially biased police officer does to Christine (Thandie Newton), the African-American woman he had misbehaved with the previous night.

Still what punches straight through to your seat are vignettes of continued black-white mistrust and the emergent suspicion of anything remotely Arab. Confronted by an agitated salesman when she and her shopkeeper father try to buy a gun, Shereen (Marina Shirtis) notes, "They think we're Arab. Since when did Persian become Arab?"

For the powerful entrusted with administration, ethnicity is however an ingredient for the alchemy of social acceptance. So you have District Attorney Rick (Brendan Fraser), who, fearing loss of popularity with the black population after his car is stolen by a pair of black youth, wants to be seen doing something good to African-Americans. He decides to pin a medal on a dark-skinned firefighter, but beats a hasty retreat when told the man is Iraqi with `Saddam' in his name.

The film conveys all this with a from-the-streets flavour. Its characters are believable, ordinary folks leading hard lives, sometimes running rackets, just the ability to remain standing separating them from the losers.

Mysteriously in big cities, it is this very life, bleak and unseen, which attracts more to its shores. Both Thandie Newton and Sandra Bullock (as Jean, Rick's wife) pull off some of their best moments on screen with dialogues that spit out the racial venom borne inside.

Crash successfully marries this nerve-wracking edginess of big city-life - that element of unpredictability to every situation just because it is a multi-ethnic setting - to the viewer's craving for pattern and belonging, and delivers an unforgettable movie experience.

The real hero of the movie has to be its Canadian director, Paul Haggis, earlier famous for writing the screenplay of Million Dollar Baby. Crash is not just his directorial debut, he conceived the story, co-wrote the screenplay and even contributed to its music.

Not to forget is the film's dialogue; smart but dripping with reality.

Crash releases on February 24. See it, for your growing city and your life in it.