Review: Alison Maclean Returns with 'The Rehearsal'
Friday, July 7, 2017 at 5:00PM By Glenn Dunks
Alison Maclean is not a prolific filmmaker. While her resume is littered with TV (Sex and the City, The Tudors), music videos (Natalie Imbruglia’s “Torn”) and short films (the superb domestic horror Kitchen Sink, and a segment in Subway Tales), films are few and far between. Her third feature is The Rehearsal and if its release feels awfully quiet then you can probably thank the near 20-year gap between feature projects and her return to her native New Zealand with a thorny film about tricky subject matter and written with a sense of ambiguous mystery.
My knowledge of New Zealand cinema is by far not as thorough as Australian film, but Maclean’s Crush is perhaps my favourite from there that isn’t Heavenly Creatures or The Piano. It is a film rife for rediscovery, not least of all for the delicious performance by Marcia Gay Harden at its centre (it also competed for the 1992 Palme d’Or). I was less enamoured by Jesus’ Son, a film that I assume stuck too closely to the often chaotic and episodic short story structure of its source novel to find its own groove, although Maclean’s experiences in the vast expanses of New Zealand and Canada gives her a unique advantage in framing the emptiness of the American mid-west and finding idiosyncrasies for her characters.
The Rehearsal is a much different style of film. It’s smaller in scope in terms of its core narrative, less tied to and reliant on its location and a sprawling need for its characters to escape whatever it is that nevertheless confines them to their place in life.