Crush

Crush is a thriller, but you don’t know that because it creeps up on you unawares. It is also a brilliant road movie

Crush, New Zealand, 1992

Director: Alison Maclean
Production co: Hibiscus Films
Producer: Bridget Ikin
Associate producer: Trevor Haysom
Director of photography: Dion Beebe
Camera operator: Ian Turtill
Screenplay: Alison Maclean, with Anne Kennedy
1st assistant director: George Lyle
Editor: John Gilbert
Assistant editor: Christine Jeffs
Production manager: Chloe Smith
Music: JPs Experience
Production designer: Meryl Cronin
Costume designer: Ngila Dickson

With: Marcia Gay Harden (Lane), William Zappa (Colin), Donogh Rees (Christina), Caitlin Bossley (Angela), Pete Smith (Horse), Jon Brazier (Arthur)

35mm, 92 minutes, M–contains sex scenes

“The publicity material for Crush runs the cutline ‘definitely not a love story.’ How right they are. This is a malevolent little modern fable featuring a sexually ambidextrous femme fatale, an awkward adolescent who is ready for her first crush, an over-the-hill novelist, and a journalist who suffers head injuries in a car crash and recovers throughout the film. An unusual story with four main characters, the narrative is complex and surprising in its turn of events. Lane, the brash, unpredictable and antisocial seductress, leaves the scene of the accident caused by her reckless driving, and proceeds to invade the lives of novelist Colin and his 15-year-old daughter, Angela, first by inviting the infatuated teenager on a wild night of debauchery and then by seducing her father. The plot turns really strange when Angela discovers the unconscious journalist in the hospital and begins to confide in her. As the journalist recovers, Angela begins to plant the seed of paranoia about the enormity of Lane’s cruelty. Deadpan and matter-of-fact in its execution, the film builds a strange sense of perversity existing very naturally within an acutely observed, very real social context – which become less and less real as it unravels. Director Maclean claims as her influences Sam Fuller, Luis Buñuel, and writer Jane Bowles for their disconcerting blend of the banal and the grotesque. Exploring the dark side of sexual identities and the shifting power of relationships, Crush winds its way to a deeply satisfying climax.” — Kay Armatage, Toronto International Film Festival, 1992

“One of the best films ever made in New Zealand – or anywhere for that matter – is Kitchen Sink, Alison Maclean’s 12-minute masterpiece. Crush, her debut feature, is [likewise] such an accomplished and mature piece of film making. Like all the best ideas it is very simple. It defines its territory and get on with what is going to happen. It never descends into arty pretension. It feels like what we have come to expect from a highly memorable independent film from America or Australia. But Crush is very much an exploration of the essence of surviving in New Zealand… Crush is a thriller, but you don’t know that because it creeps up on you unawares. It is also a brilliant road movie… I found it to be an amazing experience.” — John Parker, Metro, March 1993

“… a fascinating quadrangle of relationships, desires and half-guessed motivations. At the centre of most of it is Lane (American actress Marcia Gay Harden, from Miller’s Crossing and Used People), a charismatic femme fatale… Though it is not the same film at all, in many ways Kiwi talent Alison Maclean’s debut feature reminds me of all that was good about Jane Campion’s masterful debut, Sweetie (to my mind, still Campion’s best film); both are rich, strange, confrontational and yet unexpectedly funny works, which manage to retain a strong sense of the ambiguous without losing the quality of accessibility… For all the potential melodrama of its storyline, Crush is a movie full of wonderful subtleties and moments which convey much, not so much by what people say as what you see of them.”

Screenings: Crush screened on 14-17 March 2012; on 22 November 2006 in a programme honouring the work on sound man Robert (Bob) Allen; and 5 on April 2006 in First Steps, a programme selected by Film Archive CEO Frank Stark, looking at the first features of several well-known NZ directors