I Am Zoe Handke

``I was born into my mother's madness,'' observes Zoe Handke, nearing 40, in Larsen's charged and introspective study of a dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship. Zoe staves off emotional collapse by continually sifting images of childhood events and personalities that molded her. Often, young Zoe felt dangerously close to her physically abusive mother (``I was a mirror. My mother wanted me broken''), who was given to rageful outbursts and fabrications, and seemed to detest her daughter's very existence. Zoe's father, a mechanic from Missouri, was a shadowy, ineffectual figure in this working-class Illinois family. At college in Minnesota, Zoe endured self-punishing episodes of blindness and deafness--expressions of the terrible guilt her mother instilled in her. How she regains her faculties, marries and has children of her own is conveyed in extended reflective sections of almost shattering intensity. In a remarkable performance, Larsen ( An American Memory ) magically unravels a family's system of denial, reward, blame and myth. (Mar.)