CRASH into me

Moving at the speed of light, we are bound to collide with each other…..

That’s the tag line….though its more than that….its the whole wisdom of the film encapsulated into those lines…..


Watched the movie a couple of days back and I can say with all certainty that it is one of the best movies I have seen….


The title is apt for what follows and you see the word in almost every frame of the movie…..the characters keep bumping into each other, and at each time, we get to learn something more about them, and by the time the film ends, one realizes that the first impressions are never the last ones…..

The villain becomes the saviour almost at the cost of his own life, the conscientious one shows that he too is a victim of racial stereotyping without he, himself being aware of it…..the woman who seemed to have it all, shows at the end that what she really wants is not what she has….the ones who are considered the classical victims of racism are shown to be not above racism themselves, if not overtly but in their mind, in their thinking in stereotypes (when Ecuador and El Salvador lose their identity and the whole of Latin America become Mexico, just like Africans are Africans as if Africa is a country)

The words that Matt Dillon says to his partner perhaps symbolize the whole film “do you think you know who you are? Eh?.....You have no idea”

Racism of all types, of all varieties is interwoven in the storyline, in fact it IS the story….and in between, the lives (both visible and invisible to others) of the players, crash into the situations, that arise due their flitting across each other’s lives…..here one realizes the burden of his identity and finds a reason to fight back and there some one else finds some redemption, another one is initially painted a villain but finally we are made to realize that so many of our instant classifications are simplistic, here one more is shown to be idealistic but falls into the same mental trap for which he accuses the other. The desperations and quiet tragedy and triumphs of individual lives, whether of a person who is trying to build his roots or of a person who is not sure anymore whether the ones she chose were the right ones, is overlain in the script.

The film for me is very radical in its political and social outlook.

This is because these are issues not easy to deal with, especially as we still rely on age old definitions of our various problems, whether the problem is racism or personal misunderstandings and failures. These are issues that urgently need to be dealt with and that is why one comes out of the theatres feeling battered by our own senses….the movie just kicks us out of our comfort zones, all of them, and forces us to look within…..forces us to question our own assumptions and hidden prejudices. It just shakes you….and it feels better after having been shaken up, since so few things seem to shake us these days…..and its made better by the fact that the script does not allow for a classic storytelling, there is actually no ‘story’ as such (as we understand by a story), just perhaps crashes of all sorts….it prevents us from escaping from what the film is all about, prevents us from immersing ourselves vicariously in the story and reject the message within…..a story develops no doubt, but not in the way most of us are comfortable with…..therein lies the strength and magic of this movie…..

It’s a movie that I would carry with me for a long long time…..