PERFECTION
2011,
85 min,
USA,
Dir: Christina Beck
Christina Beck’s debut feature follows Kristabelle (played by Beck), a 30-something woman struggling with a cutting addiction and living in quietly miserable submission with her overbearing mother in the heart of the San Fernando Valley. Meanwhile, her mother Sally (Robyn Peterson), a once-aspiring actress tormented by the fame she never had, is addicted to a different kind of cutting - plastic surgery. Following a particularly distressing hook-up, Kristabelle goes on a self-mutilating rampage so bad that she winds up in a rehabilitation clinic for 30 days. There, with the help of a pot-smoking potential love interest, a newly sober British stand-up comic and the mysteries of Chinese medicine, Kristabelle struggles to find the self-acceptance she once had but lost.