Jan Jalenak

A young woman tries to leave her troubled past behind. She meets her old flame by accident and they fall in love again, but this obsessive relationship threatens to consume them.

"My father says if people don't come and see this movie, we'll starve," says Tate Sullivan, introducing his father's "The Beer Drinker's Guide to Fitness and Filmmaking." (Send canned goods to Auteur-Aid, care of Fred G. Sullivan, Saranac Lake, N.Y. 12983.) "The Guide" is the Sullivan family album, a grandiose home movie focused on the days and nights, life and times of "Adirondack" Fred. And you thought Molly Dodd was a schlemiel. Fred, the most self-obsessed creature since Garfield the Cat, produces, directs, writes, edits and stars in this offbeat, low-budget work. Fred's four children, Fred's tiresome wife Polly, Fred's business partners, psychiatrist, internist, teachers, neighbors, creditors, sommelier and so forth comment on the 42-year-old ne'er-do-well.

A carefully constructed marriage implodes when an unexpected call unleashes the fragility and wounds that have been simmering for years.

It takes place at a birthday party on a single fateful evening. Lenny, the birthday boy, is an insecure young man who has something to prove. After he's already had too much to drink, his cynical drinking buddy Willy goads him into proving his marksmanship by trying to shoot a bottle off his wife's head with a revolver. This black comedy is a farcical twist on the William Tell legend and on the true story of William Burroughs, who, likewise under the influence, tried to shoot a glass off his wife's head, missed and shot her dead instead.

Penelope's search for the kind of love that's missing in her life leads her to a motel room with another woman - only to be confronted by the realities of her marriage.