New Zealand,
1992, 97 min
Shown in 1993
CREDITS
- dir
-
Alison Maclean
- prod
-
Bridget Ikin
- scr
-
Alison Maclean, Anne Kennedy
- cam
-
Dion Beebe
- editor
-
John Gilbert
- cast
-
Marcia Gay Harden, Donogh Rees, Caitlin Bossley, William Zappa
- source
-
Strand Releasing
-
COMMENTS
Alison Maclean in person.
OTHER
New Zealand filmmaker Alison Maclean finds the stuff of mystery in the feminine mystique and in domestic space, a place for unsettling discovery (her black-and-white short Kitchen Sink, SFIFF 1990). Crush, Maclean's first feature, plumbs the naughty depths of nice New Zealand in a mystery surrounding a female triumvirate: Lane (Marcia Gay Harden), an American seductress who is trapped in femme fatale-ism like Neitzsche in a girdle, Christina, once the laughing intellectual, now comatose following a car accident with the reckless Lane at the wheel; and Angela, a teenager who looks to these two for clues as to how to be a woman. While Angela's father, Colin, a reclusive novelist, is the fly to Lane's spider, it is the impressionable Angela who is the real quarry in a deadly battle for dominance between Christina and Lane. But for Lane, as for Christina literally, the struggle is for nothing less than consciousness: when she is bad she is very bad and when she is good, well, it's too late. Crush rakes the moody open spaces of New Zealand's Rotorua countryside —"a landscape with too few lovers"—for the intrigue implied in its seething geysers and hot springs and the remnants of Aboriginal culture.
—Judy Bloch
FACTOID #80
The globetrotting thespian Anthony Quinn attended the 1969 San Francisco International Film Festival in support of the Opening Night film The Secret of Santa Vittoria, in which he played the half-drunk mayor of an Italian hamlet, protecting his town’s wine collection from German soldiers.
