Crashing into controversy

Cinema-goers in Scotland, but only in Glasgow and Edinburgh, get the chance next week to see David Cronenberg's controversial film, Crash. Those living in North Lanarkshire, where the licensing authority has banned it, will not, an empty gesture since there are no plans to show it there. In London, Westminster Council has also banned the film, but Camden has not.

The result is Crash can be seen at one end of the West End but not the other, an Alice in Wonderland situation if ever there was.

Around 50 prints of the film, launched at Cannes last year, are being released so the market is not being flooded and the British Board of Film Classification's 18 certificate limits its potential audience to adults. So why the fuss? The controversy as far as Britain is concerned, started at Cannes after the film critic of the London Evening Standard, Alexander Walker, claimed it contained ''some of the most perverted acts of sexual deviance'' he had ever seen in mainstream cinema.

For a local evening newspaper the Standard enjoys unusual influence. Its arts coverage is recognised as helping set the national tabloid agenda. Tabloid news editors, not known for following the arts, use it to spot news- worthy, shock, horror, scandal arts ''stories.'' The outcome was the Daily Mail, self-appointed guardian of the morals of Middle Britain, embarked on a vicious campaign against the film, its distributors, Sony, and the BBFC without whose certificate it would not have been released.

The paper's film critic, Christopher Tookey, said Crash promulgated ''the morality of the satyr, the nymphomaniac, the rapist, the paedophile'' and was ''an affront to the nation''. The Mail, not content with attacking the film, attacked the standards and probity of the BBFC and its members and demanded new controls on what we may see in the cinema. While admiring Mr Walker's and Mr Tookey's powers of invective, I agree with neither man's opinion and have found no other film critic who does.

Crash is a brilliant, if unappealing piece of film making which challenges audiences to look at the society in which they live. In no other country has the film received the reception given it by the Mail and Westminster Council. Nobody regrets the passing of the Lord Chamberlain, who emasculated what we could see in the theatre, while the idiocies, visual and verbal, the Hayes Office imposed on Hollywood movies in the name of decency are a matter of record.

The BBFC gives potential audiences, through its certification system, guidance on what to expect from a film. Those who attack Crash assume people go to the cinema on spec today, thus placing themselves unwittingly at risk of corruption. In the heyday of the continuous programme, when the cinema was most people's only means of entertainment, it is possible they might have gone to a film because it was showing on their night out. But that is no longer the case, especially given today's cinema ticket prices, and anybody who thinks it might be probably also believe pigs can fly.

Crash, based on the novel by J G Ballard, is not a pornographic film and is in no sense erotic. The effect is not arousal, but awareness of fallibility. It is about people living in a society dominated by the machine whose lives are emotionally sterile. They find physical and emotional satisfaction through courting danger and go to ever further extremes to satisfy their needs. They do this by staging famous car crashes, and eventually by risking their lives in crashes of their own. But Crash never pretends violence does not have consequences. People get hurt, suffer pain, pay the price of pleasure. This never happens in the films of Willis, Stallone, Segal, or Schwarzenegger where casual cartoon violence is accepted without murmur by the moralists.

It is the sexual encounters which have given Crash's enemies much of their material, although they are actually no different from what is screened week in week out, except for one involving a woman, wearing a body brace because of her injuries. It is miles removed from the soft porn world of Demi Moore or Sharon Stone, but, since we are regularly urged to accept the disabled have the same right to a sex life as the able bodied, should be no more distasteful to watch than seeing these ladies writhe around naked. Crash's ''crime'', of course, is to show something people would rather not see, let alone admit happens, conditioned as they are to accepting only the beautiful.

Crash is not a sex-ploitation film. It makes audiences face up to the unpleasant reality about today's society. Whatever guidance we need in deciding whether to see it are provided by the BBFC certification system. The Lord Chamberlain was sent packing by old Labour in 1968. New Labour should do in 1997 for the power of local authority busybodies to license films what old Labour did to the Lord Chamberlain.

n In Glasgow the film can be seen at the Odeon, The Quay and the Grosvenor, Hillhead, and in Edinburgh at the Cameo, Tollcross, and the UCI.