Crazy Love: A Fractured, Fairy-Tale Documentary

It'd be easy to dismiss the new documentary Crazy Love with a few pointed sentences of feminist dogma as a film glorifying domestic violence. Easy, but not entirely true. Depicting the true story of Burt and Linda Pugach's insane courtship and even more confounding marriage, the film is less social commentary and more a tale of one woman's personal triumph over adversity. While her choice of solutions might elude the rest of us, they seem to have worked for her.

Told through interviews with the couple and their respective closest friends, Crazy Love is about a couple who've managed to make an uneasy peace after 50 years of being in each other's lives. All very mundane, until the viewer realizes that this relationship involves adultery, acid-tossing, jail time and disfigurement. That's where things get interesting.

Pugach was obsessed with Linda from the moment they met. Also, he was already married. This little detail gets lost in translation and the two begin dating. When Linda discovers the truth, she breaks things off with Burt. To retaliate, he hires someone to toss acid at Linda. He explains in the film that he was "just" going to have her beaten so he could be her hero and rescue her.

Twisted, yes? It gets worse.

Fast forward through Burt's trial and subsequent jail time, and Linda's recuperation, and the two are reunited. Rather than remain lifelong enemies, they decide to...marry. Dream or nightmare? The audience is left to determine that for themselves.

Throughout this Dan Klores film, a blend of home movies, photographs, interviews and one sublime, tongue-in-cheek soundtrack, we're exposed to the "'folie a deux" or the shared madness of this couple's thoughts about themselves and one another. It becomes clear that Linda banked on her beauty as a ticket to a bigger, better world. Once blinded and scarred, she viewed herself as "damaged goods" and suitable only for Burt. For his part, Burt is still the 'have his cake and eat it, too' kind of narcissistic, larger than life persona. As recently as 1996 he was back in court, this time for charges of menacing and threatening another woman with whom he was having an affair. Apparently, live and learn is not a motto for Pugach. Neither is it for Linda, who finds herself on the stand defending the actions of her husband.

As the saying goes: you can't make this stuff up.

Still, somehow, all of this makes sense when viewed from Linda Pugach's perspective. Raised during a time when marriage and a woman's looks were her biggest cachet, then robbed of same at an early age, she seems to have made peace with her life and choices. Burt may well be a monster, but he's her monster. Also, it seems she enjoys exacting continued revenge on her husband and abuser. Forever telling him to jump, she's certain his guilt will result in a response of "how high?"
Water the plants. Pull out her chair. Dote on her. No demand is too much to ask of Burt, who does all of these with a smile.

In some weird way, the audience is left cheering for this couple. After all, they've made a marriage work for 35 years, through some of the strangest events imaginable. The fact that these events were of their own design seems somehow secondary. When the elderly couple is seen walking down the street arm-in-arm, heads close together, or dining at a nearby cafeteria, they look like any other normal, happy couple. And in many ways, they may be just that.