Community Notebook

Sea Salt and Magic Realism

There are similarities between the Oscar contender In the Bedroom and the indie film Besotted, by Woodstock resident Holly Angell Hardman. Both depict life and love in a New England coastal town among lobster fisherman. And both plots turn on a tragic gunshot. But only one film involves a genial witch in designer pantsuits.

Hardman, who is the producer-writer-director of Besotted, also plays the film’s sorceress. And if her ethereal powers carry over into real life, she aims to make Besotted a success. Yet, the 92-minute fable has been slowly making its way across the country in small screenings, with no distributor in sight. Hardman—whose abstract observations, blond hair, and cheekbones recall Joni Mitchell, circa 1971—seems more invested in personal growth than in commercial success. She exults in the learning experience of her first feature film.

“I celebrate the fact that I threw up the cards,” she said. “What I learned was more about production problems and solving them. About structuring the sale of a film.”

Besotted takes place in Chatham, on Cape Cod. Shep, a once-hardy lobsterman, pickled by depression and drink, still holds a torch for fisherwoman Vicki. But she has been attracted by the surface beauty of Damien, a Harvard boy summering on the Cape. Hoping to reunite the old lovers, the sorceress (think a loopier Samantha Stevens) guides their destinies on a game board in her backyard. But playing puppeteer to messy mortals proves difficult.

The film offers magic realism with a hearty dose of Yankee sea salt. Hardman counts among her inspirations Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Luis Bunuel and Peter Greenaway. The very genesis of Besotted has its roots in serendipity, a phenomenon the producer-director trusts.

Hardman was working on another screenplay set in Dutchess County, depicting the life of a child molester, when she took a 1997 trip to Tortolla in the Caribbean. Along the road, she met an old woman selling pottery. When Hardman explained she had spent summers on Cape Cod since the age of two, the woman admitted she was also once a Cape resident. But she refused to say more.

“She just clammed up,” Hardman recalled. “It struck a chord. I went back to the shack I rented and my mind was flooded with memories of the dynamic of Cape Cod and the different strata. It’s a class system there. A lifestyle that is very edgy, very self-destructive. I have found in the past when people write about quaint, old Cape Cod, it is like a postcard. Pretty. But it’s very different from that, because that world is unfortunately depressing, hard, relentless.”

Sunsets in Besotted are majestic, and landscapes vibrate with folk-art colors. But there is tension and sadness beneath the surface. Hardman has authentically captured a world dependent on a capricious and unpredictable industry, where downtime is more than an excuse for alcoholism.

While the strength of its narrative ebbs and flows like the Atlantic tide, Besotted has a look that exceeds its $1.2 million budget. Hardman— whose career features stints as a performance artist, music promoter for the band L7, writing assistant for Aaron Latham, and short film director—clearly called in industry favors. There were scores of crew members, an uncommon quality for low-budget films. Still, it took four years for Besotted to proceed from fundraising to post-production. “Thank God that we had the economy we did at the time. At least it made me feel as if I could find some gamblers,” said Hardman.
A cast that included both amateurs and professionals provided unexpected twists to the final script, Hardman said. Actor improvisation helped move her re-envisioned script. Originally, the story was to be told from the perspective of the bitter Vicki. But when Jim Chiros, an accomplished painter and sometime actor, was cast as Shep, the strength of his performance persuaded Hardman to place the drunken dreamer at the center of the film.

Although she had misgivings that she had portrayed characters too unforgivingly, Hardman was reassured at the Provincetown Film Festival last summer. “People said it was nice to see a depiction without the baloney. That brought great joy,” Hardman said.

Splitting her time between New York City and Woodstock for two years, Hardman admitted that her business side is more deeply rooted in the City. She had not even looked into showing Besotted at the Woodstock Film Festival. Hardman uses her time upstate as a retreat from the urban hustle and bustle. “I hardly interact with anyone up here,” Hardman said. “I’m probably in my own little world. I’m still so caught up in the New York world.”

She spends weekdays in her office close to Ground Zero.
Her next projects are “two different films for two different worlds,” she said. One is a comedy about a band of retired punk rockers who reunite, to the horror of their teenage children, for their town bicentennial. Hardman describes it as “a committed small-town romp.”
The second one, which takes place in western Massachusetts, explores the dynamics of sibling violence.

As to her own reaction to Besotted, Hardman said without hesitation, “I accept the flaws.” Several colleagues have suggested that the inclusion of a well-known actor would have improved the film’s chances. “That’s all I have run into. ‘Gee Holly,’ they would say, ‘with something as out there as this, you just gotta have famous people.’”

She grew silent for a minute, reflecting on the advice. And in another burst of atypical filmmaker honesty, she added, “I feel really bad about not being able to give a better return on money that was raised. I want to do better for the people who have faith in me next time.”

—Jay Blotcher