Hostage: The Christine Maresch Story

Based on the real life experiences of its eponymous heroine Hostage: The Christine Maresch Story is imbued with the kind of robust cynicism that fueled the renaissance in Australian films of the 1970s and gave us such low brow pleasures as Alvin Purple (1973), Stone (1974) and The Man From Hong Kong (1975). That is, it is essentially an exploitation film.  Had it been pushed a few stops more it might have been closer to Woody Allen’s early absurdist comedies such as Take The Money And Run (1969). Unfortunately it doesn’t go that far but still there are passages that should raise a chuckle or two.

Christine Maresch (Kerry Mack) was a typical working class Aussie damsel living with her mother in some unidentified Australian town with a job running a side-show at a fairground (I don’t know how she could have such peripatetic employ and still live at home but no matter). Fellow employee Walter (Ralph Schicha), a German immigrant, falls in love with her and asks her to marry him. When she turns him down he shoots himself, then refuses to have medical attention unless she accepts him. She does but then she finds out that Walter wants to go back to Germany to join his Neo-Nazi mates and save the Fatherland.

Yes, even if the film is based on Maresch’s own retelling of the story it sounds like pure trash and the script and performances do it justice. Schicha clearly studied at the Arnold Schwarzenegger Academy of Acting and his accent is enough to turn every scene that he is in into a parody. The rest of the cast are not far behind but fortunately Mack's Christine grounds proceedings as she tries doggedly to have a normal life with Walter but gradually comes to realize that he's a certifiable nut job (the film’s opening suggest that she was a victim of domestic violence at the hands of her, I assume, father). 

An independent production with an evidently low budget as with so many B movies the story’s context is appropriated in order to give it more cogency. Thus, not only do we get blunt insertions of archival footage of the Nazi’s Nuremberg rallies, the German-set section of the film alludes to The Baader-Meinhof group and Patty Hearst (one of those chuckles comes when Walter hears a news story of the suicide of the leaders of the former and observes ruefully to Christine "Now there's a relationship that worked!".

It is pointless to say that Hostage: The Christine Maresch Story could have been better. It would have been a different film. As it is, it's awkward but determined and precisely because there is no clear dividing line between the intended and unintended it’s quite an entertaining experience in a cultish way. 

 

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