LITTLE SHOTS OF HAPPINESS

Wearing its puny budget proudly like a tribal scar, LITTLE SHOTS OF HAPPINESS won't let you look away. Fran, wed five years to a drunken psychotic of a husband, occupies a cubicle and telephone at a dreary Boston collection agency. “This job is a freak magnet, ” she narrates, “which scares me, because of all the people, I've worked here the longest.” One morning after a beating she packs her sexiest dresses in a suitcase. After work, she changes clothes in the employee lavatory. Fran starts spending nights in different bars, different clubs, with different men. Same drinks. Soon all is a foggy haze as Fran (or is her name Natasha now? Casey?) staggers through another blank day, on the road to oblivion. But even if her life is an out-of-control vehicle, heading for the rocks, train wreck ahead aaaargh! she can take some satisfaction in this: other folks she meets are a lot worse off than she is. Enjoy. Not since Susan Seidelman's “Smithereens” made a noise like breaking glass on the indie film scene has there been a heroine as defiant or a movie as grimly funny as this one.