"Bespotted"

SYNOPSIS: Set in a charming New England fishing village, Besotted is a darkly-comic modern fable that turns notions of traditional narrative form upside-down. First-time feature director and writer Holly Angell Hardman joins an ensemble cast that includes Amy Wright (Joe, the King; The Accidental Tourist; Breaking Away), Liam Waite (Simpatico; The Day October Died), Susan Gibney (Star Trek: The Next Generation; Cabin by the Lake), Jim Chiros (The Propostion), and Richard Cox (Looking for Richard, Chinese Coffee). In this strange and whimsical film, writer/director Hardman explores the role of the film’s creator, and inserts herself into the film narrative as a know-it-all sorceress from the big city, who is vacationing on picturesque Cape Cod. To amuse herself, she sets up a magical boardgame on her bayview lawn, so that she can easily manipulate the love lives of her characters from a geographically close, but emotionally uninvolved, distance. Though she would prefer not to think so, she has a particular soft spot for the dry-witted, drunken Shep (Chiros). Shep’s life appears to be spinning dangerously out of control, in great part because of his infatuation with his lost-love Vicky (Gibney), a tough, but heartrending woman who ekes out a living on a lobster boat. Vicky, in turn, develops an unrequited crush on her summer hire, Damien (Waite), a golden-boy Harvard grad student. Fittingly ensconced in the local Lighthouse Theatre-by-the-Sea, the writer-witch Holly implements theatrical devices, such as Shakespearean structuring and Absurdist experimentation, throughout Besotted, affording her and her apprentices (Murray and Wright) the ability to observe and manipulate the human drama that is playing out before them. This seaside coven are dabbling with the very laws of nature, a risky gambit, to be sure, particularly when they appear to be as concerned with clambakes and clubbing as they are with human tragedy.