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Hero image for Crush

Crush

Film (Trailer and Excerpts) – 1992

M
Mature

Crush is a tale of simmering sexuality set in Rotorua. Moral or sexual ambiguity pervades the narrative of conflicted desire. Its mix of blocked-up writer, spurting mud-pools, infatuated teen, eel farm, American femme fatale (Marcia Gay Harden), noir motels, limp pongas and wheelchairs, plays out in a symbolic NZ landscape not seen before (or since). Director Alison Maclean's debut feature (which she co-wrote with Anne Kennedy) played in competition at the Cannes Film Festival.

... a scary fairy tale about primal, warring female energies ... as the film's nominal femme fatale, Lane (Marcia Gay Harden) doesn't pack a gun as much as an attitude — mocking, predatory, carnal, malign — that makes you speculate what chronic neurosis is impelling her, though you also like her for the way her wildness exposes the other adults' intellectual pretensions.
– Critic Graham Fuller, in Interview magazine

Acknowledgements

Made with funding from the New Zealand Film Commission in association with NZ On Air and Avalon/National Film Unit Studios

Music

Music by JPS Experience, plus some music by Antony Partos
 

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