Recently I rented the little known 2001 film Crush from Lovefilm. I did so because I saw the cut price video outside blockbuster in one of their clearout sales, and was so intrigued I decided I HAD to see it. This is the poster, here. Why is Imelda Staunton, Grand High Duchess of British Acting, doing a sassy jazz dance pose whilst her friends stand back to back? I had to find out.
Anyway, I’m intrigued by films that seem awful and have probably been watched by a grand total of 3 people, only 1 of whom is still alive, as the others lost the will to live. But I’m also obsessed with a very specific brand of terrible film, usually made pre-9/11. As it happens, this was released the month before the terrible attacks on the World Trade Center in New York (NO I AM NOT MAKING A CONNECTION BETWEEN THE TWO, THE FILM’S NOT THAT BAD). But you’ll see why I’ve brought this up a bit later in this article.
The film tells the story (and spoilers, here, but who gives a fuck, it’s not like you’re going to watch it, is it?) of 3 forty-something professional ladies, seemingly living in the lush, green, wet, perpetually late spring British countryside, in apparently palatial houses, and why their lives are so hard and sad and rubbish. In fact, this film was originally titled The Sad Fuckers Club, and within the first 10 minutes, it’s not easy to see why. Certainly, that would have been a more fitting title than the final one: Crush. Interesting fact: crush films are sadistic movies where (usually attractive, stilletoed) ladies crush animals to death for the sexual pleasure of horrid perverts. So there’s that to think about.
Anyway the film tells the story of yadda yadda yadda, three ladies who get together once a week to discuss how sad their lives are whilst they chain smoke cigarettes and drink a bottle of red wine each, and then 3 more during an M&S microwaveable dinner. Andie McDowall plays, implausibly, a waif-like, quavery-voiced American expatriate headmistress at a posh private school, Imelda Staunton is a tough but hazard-prone Chief Police Detective or something, and Anna Chancellor, or Ducky from Four Weddings and a Funeral, is an enormously well-paid GP. These are women with big salaries and even bigger houses, and yet their greatest pleasure is eating, drinking and smoking themselves into a coma and competing to see who is the saddest, old over-the-hill fucker. EMPOWERING, LADIES.
Once we’ve established this, the plot gets underway, and of course, she being the most conventionally pretty, Andie McDowall gets to be the main character and the story of her hot and heavy affair with an ex-pupil young enough to be her son becomes the crux of the plot. When she first meets this young lad, who implausibly (implausibly will be the most used word in this review) is called Jed, it is at a funeral, and afterwards they fuck on a tombstone. By this point, Imelda Staunton has escaped a scary rapey fake cab driver by drunkenly stumbling slowly off into the woods (as if scary rapists don’t run after potential victims who are also Chief Police Detectives in small towns where everyone knows who everyone is) and Anna Chancellor has said ‘rectal prolapse’ very loudly in a room full of old people in kilts.
Yes, this is the sort of film, made at the sort of time, where swearing loudly, and women doing sex, especially degrading sex like sex on a tombstone, was considered edgy and current and important. God knows I love Sex and the City (the tv series, not the ghastly films) but this is its legacy: lots of middle aged ladies doing brazen fucks in public because it’s controversial and they’re empowered and say swears like ‘cunt’ a lot and snorezzzzzzzzzzz.
Anna Chancellor reminds me a lot of Bridget Jones’ best friend, Shazzer, actually, who appeared in the film released earlier that year, who swears a lot because Generation X and post-modern and young, stressed professionals and blah blah blah. Sidenote over.
The rest of the film portrays Andie’s torrid affair and her friends’ disapproval, with increasingly implausible (told you) plot twists. First Andie is too ashamed to admit that this is who she’s shagging, then she gets caught being fucked by him in Imelda’s house or something. Then they’re not in love, then they are, then they’re going to get married, then they’re not. Other implausible things that happen during the course of the film: Andie McDowall’s acting and character. This is a character played by a woman who is, or was, a famous model for god’s sake, and the only people who want to be with her in a community presumably full of horny men are a bumbling vicar and a barely legal organ playing ex-schoolboy.
I know that love is a kerazy thing and makes you act like an insane, but Andie’s character really acts like no human being who has ever been a human being. This is a woman who’s worked her way up to the position of HEADMISTRESS in a prestigious school, and yet ‘love’ (or is it?!?!?) makes her so fluttery and unsure that she acts like a berk in front of her entire school, shoving aside years of professionalism in order to decree that all faculty and students take the day off because it’s sunny. THIS NEVER HAPPENS BECAUSE THE BOARD OF GOVERNERS WOULD STEP IN AND DECREE THAT YOU TAKE THE REST OF YOUR CAREER OFF BECAUSE YOU ARE FIRED.
In the interest of fairness, the two ‘girlfriends’ act like idiots at all times too. The three of them decide to take an impromptu trip to Paris, funded by Anna’s ex-husband’s credit card, that he conveniently left with her after they divorced years ago, and forget to cancel or ask for back (as if he wouldn’t get a massive bill in the post saying “EXPENSIVE SPA AND SHOPPING TRIP TO PARIS, PLEASE PAY UP NOW”, and get suspicious) and the three ladies get horny and randy with some VERY UGLY old French men. Disgusting.
Andie has just done the nasty with one, we’re lead to believe, when she realises that compared to this rotting, bulbous old Gallic gentleman, she’d much rather be fucking her nubile, countryside Jed, and rushes back to England. She doesn’t even tell her friends she’s going (as if they wouldn’t notice her packing) and we don’t see her travelling back. She just arrives, what seems like 4 seconds later, back in the English countryside, to tell Jed that she does love him and they should get married.
Believe it or not, it gets more implausible. Of course, Imelda and Anna decide that this can’t happen, they can’t marry. Judgemental cunts. This is a woman who is alone and desperate for a baby (aren’t all women) and has survived cancer, and they can’t let her enjoy a marriage with a man she claims to love, just because he’s young!! He proves himself to be more cultured and interesting than they are, and yet they turn up their noses because he slurps his soup (really!).
Their reason for this is they are hateful bitches who want to ruin Andie’s life, but claim to have her best interests at heart. In one totally awful scene, Anna attempts to seduce Jed, whilst Imelda videotapes on a comedically large video camera, so that they can show it to Andie and she won’t want to marry such a wanton, carnal stud no more. No true friend would act like this to ANYBODY, unless they were insane. To go to those lengths: awful.
So Jed runs off into the wild after an argument with Andie and gets run over by a lorry. Yes I know these things happen in real life, BUT REALLY. This happens for no reason at all. It doesn’t help the plot along, it doesn’t teach the characters anything, it doesn’t make sense. It just happens. It doesn’t even happen to show the frailty of fleeting life in a fragile and senseless world. It happens so that everyone can cry for a bit before they make up in the final act. AWFUL.
So Jed dies because melodrama in an otherwise pedestrian pseudo-rom-com, and everyone stops being friends, and it was during this part of the film that I started to enjoy it because the following priceless lines were offered up. First Anna tries to see Andie at the hospital and when she’s not let into the room because you can’t just storm into a hospital, she says “Fuck off, I’m a doctor”. YES! SHE DOES! I thought this was hilarious and brilliant and, yes, implausible.
But the best for last: when Imelda is cross at Anna for fucking things up by thinking that seducing her best friend’s fiancé might solve everyone’s life traumas (idiot), she shouts, at work, in the middle of the police station, “YOU ARE QUEEN WRONG OF THE BASTARD FUCKING WRONG PEOPLE.”
WOW.
That is my title now. That is going on my twitter bio, my CV, my first album sleeve notes, a tattoo on my lower back and MY GRAVE.
Genius.
So that happens and then of course, Andie nearly marries a vicar but sicks up on him instead of saying “I do” (she literally does, it’s spectacular) and then she’s pregnant with her dead boyfriend’s baby (surprise! happy ending!) and then Anna is randomly a late-flowering lesbian, not because she has feelings for a woman, but because she grabs one and snogs her at a party to make people stop looking at her AND THEN SHE IS A LESBIAN. That’s how lesbianism works. It could happen to you. It’s that simple. And Imelda starts dating a petty criminal with a Spanish villa who actually says these words to her in this order: “I want to be in your pussy, right now.”
Yes, someone says this to Queen Imelda. Worth the price of admission alone.
And it’s all larks and the end.
What I was trying to say with the 9/11 thing was that post-9/11 is a term usually applied to a feeling of fear/desperation/panic/terror/fear-mongering/suspicion that arose after the horrible terrorist attacks, but I feel like it also marks a time when media became more cynical. It’s not just down to the all-pervading horror that followed these dreadful incidents, it’s the rise of the internet, the rise of globalisation and the oncoming environmental threats. We now live in a cynical, self-referencing, ironic, post-ironic world, and I feel like media and art reflect this.
Crush, in this sense, is very clearly pre-9/11. It’s weirdly hopeful for a film about sad, lonely, old, rich ladies. Their problems are relatively small, no mention is made of the internet or even the rest of the world, developing or otherwise, and someone actually thought that people would be interested in hearing about white, middle class people aspirationally complain and cry and laugh and be life-affirming (they were wrong in this instance, but it was a trend that brought in a lot of money in those days and was considered culturally acceptable without fear of admonishment).
I’m fascinated with films like this, that could only have existed in this time. No one would think to write or film or fund a movie like this now. Even in Desperate Housewives, which is a more recent continuation of the trend, everything was always more sinister, with nods to environmental disaster and terrorism, even in sheltered suburbia.
I urge you to watch this slice of implausibility. Most of all, I urge you to read this entire article and not skim to the end. I think it’s one of the most lucid and vaguely humorous things I’ve ever written. But then I’m biased. Or maybe I’m just Queen Wrong of the Bastard Fucking Wrong People. Anyway, you decide.
