JUPITER’S WIFE

THE FISHER KING was fiction; JUPITER'S WIFE is not. When documentary filmmaker Michel Negroponte first met Maggie walking her pack of adopted stray dogs in Manhattan's Central Park, he was fascinated by this vivacious, vagabond mystic, and her complex of inner cosmology of Greek gods and outrageous claims. Maggie said she was a kidnapped daughter of movie stars, consort of Zeus, a mother of quintuplets, cruelly seperated from all her loved ones yet psychically in tune with them, and in the habit of encountering folks like Robert Ryan and John Lennon long after their alleged deaths. Rather than label the homeless woman as insane and deluded-such dismissive words are never used in this feature-Negroponte investigates the coded clues in Maggie's cheerful monologues and body language (pay close attention to her impromptu “rat dance”) and pieces together fragments of a unique and remarkable life, transformed by mental illness into metaphorical fantasies that are closer to truth than anyone would ever dare imagine. You will never forget Maggie, and you will wonder about all the other wanderers and eccentrics out there. What strange secrets do they guard?