LOVE & DIANE

Her name is Love Hazzard, and it would defy the imagination of most dramatists to evoke a better two-word summary of an 'at-risk' family, and the tortured dynamics that go along with it, warmth and resentment, innocence and guilt, heaven and hell. Love and her siblings were torn from their mother, Diane, by New York City's social services after a school-age Love informed a teacher about Diane's crack habit. After a decade of separation Diane claims to be clean, sober and prayerful. But the damage is done; Love and Diane are virtual strangers to one another, and at a time when the daughter could use the most support. For the now-adult Love is HIV-positive, and she has passed the virus on to her newborn baby boy Donyaeh. Furthermore, the younger Hazzard suffers from mental illness, and she now claims memories of childhood molestation by Charles, a now-deceased brother whose efforts to lift Diane out of addiction have enshrined him as a household hero. When Diane confides her fears about Love's state of mind to her own counselor, police threaten to put Donyaeh into foster care, unless Love Hazzard can prove to the system her fitness as a parent. It takes a village to raise a child, goes a certain New York senator's favorite cliche, but it can take a city to destroy a family, and this one is frighteningly vulnerable. Movies are not commonly made about the people in LOVE & DIANE, the ones barely clinging to the strands of society's so-called safety net, and that makes Jennifer Dworkin's monumental verit? documentary so much richer, and more important.