Crazy? Try Totally Bizarre

Sun Herald

Sunday November 25, 2007

Rob Lowing

CRAZY LOVE

Rated: M

Critic's warning: Language, adult themes.

Critic's rating: 8/10

IT HELPS not to know much at all about the jaw-dropping new documentary Crazy Love but don't worry if the blabby ads or advance reviews have spelled out some key developments.

As in the domestic expose Capturing The Friedmans, this examination of a very twisted relationship has so many small, shocking details - and a sting in the tail - that you'll be too caught up in the visuals on screen to remember previous information.

Right from the start, the flimsy relationship of driven, emotionally disintegrating lawyer Burt Pugach and upwardly mobile party girl Linda Riss seems doomed. He's obsessed with her, in a weirdly controlling way, and she is too dazzled by his apparent money to commit to the decent guy who would make a much better husband.

Then, in 1959, comes the violent attack that will destroy Linda's life and leave Burt facing 15 years in prison.

But it is what happens next that makes Crazy Love almost too bizarre to believe. And then, just as you do believe it, you're given a twist on the situation that might say more about long-term relationships and co-dependency than any film so far.

What makes this 90-minute feature so compulsively watchable is that director Dan Klores has been able to interview the subjects together and - despite Burt's objections, according to Linda - separately.

It is the reflections by the couple and their often furious friends that make the film more than an anatomy of a stormy (some would say, freakish) relationship.

The candid quotes, old photos and 1950s home movies and newspaper clippings build up a real sense of the tough, working-class world of New York's postwar Bronx.

One of the many fascinating themes is not only the desperate desire to marry out of a poor suburb but also the facades adopted in the process: the rich bachelor who isn't, the party girl who is actually a virgin. Watching this five-decade-old tragedy, it's too easy seeing the similarities with today's consumer-obsessed and remake, remodel world.

© 2007 Sun Herald

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