Film Festival: Jesus' Son

CHARLES EALY detects chinks of light in the dark work of Alison Maclean.

New Zealand director Alison Maclean's first feature-length film, 1992's dark and disturbed Crush, looked as if it emerged from some kind of primordial soup. It was filled with rain, rot, greenery and growth.

Crush dealt with two sexually confused women, one of whom causes a car crash that leaves the other partly paralysed.

When the victim regains some mobility after months of rehabilitation, there is no regenerative hugging during a reunion in a lush park. Instead, the victim slowly rises from her wheelchair, waddles towards the old friend and pushes her off a cliff.

Maclean's latest effort, Jesus' Son, has similar primordial imagery, as well as the signature opening car crash.

Wrapped in a damp blanket, a straggly Billy Crudup stands alone on the side of a road that runs through a forest. He talks about how he knows that he's going to be picked up by a family - and how he knows that they're all headed for a collision a few kilometres ahead.

When the car rolls up, he calmly gets into the back seat and waits for the inevitable rain-slicked carnage.

For the next hour, Jesus' Son slides through a series of tragedies and startling images: heroin overdoses, shootings, gory car crashes, a naked woman sailing through frosty air and, most memorably, a man who walks around with a knife sticking out of his eye.

"But I don't think it's as dark and primordial as Crush," says Maclean, who has been living in New York for the past eight years working as a director of telemovies as well as helming episodes of Sex In The City. "When I was filming Crush in New Zealand I was very happy every time it rained. But inJesus' Son there is some sunlight. And I think there are quite a few things in the film that are relatively funny, kinda funny."

Clearly, Maclean has an odd sense of humour. But Jesus' Son is more hopeful and life-affirming than Crush. Her first movie focused on revenge, as if it were permanently stuck in a thick, emotional gumbo. Jesus' Son, which moves from the upper Midwest to sun-drenched Arizona, deals with healing - and marks a giant step in the growth of Maclean as an artist.

"Jesus' Son is a series of stories, a man looking back on his life in his 20s, looking at this kind of crucible of a few years of his life, when he descended into an intense period," Maclean says. "When I say crucible, I mean that it transformed him. It made him into a different person. And in a way, it's about a search for his place in the world.

"I think I've always felt a little on the outside ... like I'm a foreigner," says Maclean, 41, who was born in Canada but moved to New Zealand in her teens.

"For this film, I think I was trying to get on the inside. I think that was the real challenge, for it to be a first-person film, to have that subjectivity, to get underneath someone's skin so that you're seeing things through his eyes."

The difficulty was that needles filled with heroin were also piercing the same skin. So the narrative needed to reflect the logic of an addict.

"It's disjointed, yeah," the director says. "But to me it is the logic of someone telling you their life story. "One things leads to another and it just builds up with associations. Some of it you may not fully understand while you're watching, but it kinda makes sense afterward, because all these anecdotes add up to a life.

"I think that good work comes from the tension between structure and chaos, between that very rational kind of thinking and the more chaotic ambiguity," she says. "You need both. Otherwise you have a mess."NZPA

* Jesus' Son screens at the Auckland International Film Festival on Monday, July 17 (3.45 pm) and Tuesday, July 18 (8.30 pm). Alison Maclean will speak at a seminar hosted by Women in Film and Television (Wift) at the Auckland Gallery Theatrette on Sunday, July 16 at 7.30 pm.

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