Casey Puccini’s I DON’T CARE

The following review of Casey Puccini’s I Don’t Care appeared at Time Out Chicago today. 

I Don’t Care, the sophomore feature of Chicago filmmaker Casey Puccini (Children Without Parents), will receive its local premiere at Chicago Filmmakers this Saturday, August 25. It’s a sharply made, acerbic comedy chronicling a pretentious filmmaker (played by Puccini himself in a performance that impresses for its stubborn refusal to elicit viewer sympathy) whose most recent micro-budget opus spirals out of control due to a combination of his own incompetence and unexamined hubris. Puccini has described the movie as not strictly autobiographical although, given that he’s also calling it a “cautionary tale,” it seems likely that both the central character and basic scenario arose from imagining his life having gone down a darker path.

If the selfish fictional character of “Casey Puccini” were the whole show, I Don’t Care might risk being a too-bitter pill to swallow. Fortunately, Puccini had the good sense to cast the soulful, Jeff-award winning actress Sasha Gioppo opposite him (as an actress named, you guessed it, Sasha), and much of this modest film’s comedic power results from waiting for her character—initially good-natured but unpaid and underfed—to crack under the guidance of her ungrateful and indecisive “auteur.” The tension between the two reaches a boiling point in this modest movie’s best scene, where a paranoid Gioppo accuses Puccini of stealing her necklace during the course of a particularly stressful shooting day. It’s a mini-masterpiece of cringe humor that should resonate with anyone familiar with the sometimes-harrowing process of artistic collaboration.

For more information about the Chicago Premiere of I Don’t Care visit the Chicago Filmmakers website.