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Event
Dispatches From the Underground - MAD
Boston Underground Film Festival presents
DISPATCHES FROM THE UNDERGROUND
A new monthly screening series featuring selections from the BUFF vault. This months selection is
Robert G. Putkas MAD
When recently-divorced matriarch Mel is admitted to the hospital after a nervous breakdown, daughters Connie and Casey roll their eyes with abject annoyance. Type-A Connie and aimless Casey have their own lives. And dealing with moms mental illness may just reveal their complete inability to take responsibility for their own issues. Issues that include complicity in white collar crime and cam girl self-denial, respectively.
During the Cold War, MAD referred to mutually-assured destructionthe threat of two or more opposing parties warring tendencies to end not with a winner, but complete and total annihilation. Here the term is deftly applied to the nuclear family, as mother and sisters arm themselves with bitter barbs and stubborn isolationism to further erode an already fractious relationship.
Writer-director Robert G. Putka draws from his own volatile relationship with his mother, as well as the sense of purposelessness one feels when youre not moving forward with your life. And as Mels psych ward friendship with Jerry reminds usmaybe were all just fuckups desperately trying to keep it together.
Family dysfunction is a slow-growing tumor that festers with every passive aggressive attack on ones life choices, or thinly-veiled barb referencing a long-past transgression. Theres never just one thing. Dont expect specifics as to exactly how the relationship between these three women became so fractured. None of it matters. More than anything, MAD is an often abrasive, sad, and laugh-out-loud allegory of how ruminative self-hatred can paralyze completely, and transform us into unrelenting assholes to those who love us most.
Director/Screenwriter: Robert G. Putka, with: Jennifer Lafleur, Maryann Plunkett, Eilis Cahill, Mark Reeb, color, 2016, USA, 84 min. Text by Melinda Green
Preceded by the short films:
HOOKAH FACE AND THE VIRGIN BOY (Putka, 7 min.)
and
MOUTHFUL (Putka, 12 min.)
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LocationSomerville Theater Microcinema (View)
55 Davis Square
Somerville, MA 02144
United States
Categories
| Minimum Age: 17 |
| Kid Friendly: No |
| Dog Friendly: No |
| Non-Smoking: Yes! |
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