REVIEWED - TARNATION: Jonathan Caouette's curious film, intricately stitched together from various media in such a way as to utterly defy categorisation, has about it the quality of an imaginative teenager's scrapbook. I'm thinking of those dog-eared journals containing photos of icons such as Sylvia Plath and Kurt Cobain - and bus tickets and wild flowers and two eyelashes possibly belonging to dreamy Todd - often surrounded by thin, spidery biro patterns, which, upon examination, prove to be poems detailing the unfairness of everything, writes Donald Clarke
Now, it cannot be denied that Caouette, a 31-year-old gay Texan, has a great deal to be miserable about. His mother, Renee Leblanc, to whom he is touchingly close, has endured severe mental illness ever since receiving electro-shock therapy as a child. The director himself, though largely raised by his weird, gap-toothed grandparents, suffered abuse at the hands of foster parents and, following an unwitting experimentation with angel dust, became saddled with something called depersonalisation disorder. There's more misfortune where that came from.
All that noted, readers may still be forgiven for approaching Caouette's own scrapbook (home videos, pop songs, clips from favourite TV shows) with considerable suspicion. Don't be put off. Though Jonathan's superhuman capacity for self-absorption is frequently irritating, Tarnation is an ingenious, spellbinding piece of work, which may well launch a whole new school of cinema.
Edited on the iMovie software that comes bundled with an Apple Macintosh, this is the first commercially released feature to fully exploit the possibilities of laptop film-making. Comparisons have been made with the work of underground auteurs such as Andy Warhol and Kenneth Anger, but Tarnation's startling juxtapositions of found media would not - on this budget, at least - have been achievable without the use of contemporary technologies.
A key early sequence, brilliantly cut to Glen Campbell's Wichita Lineman, shows Caouette's technique to advantage. Shuffling family snapshots, video footage and blocks of text - we are told that Renee was raped in Jonathan's presence - the montage becomes ever more oppressive as the music, its sweetness now as sinister as that of The Childcatcher's lollypops, builds to ear-bursting volume. Whereas the scenes in which Caouette moans (no other word will do, I'm afraid) directly to camera come over as a tad indulgent, this dazzling episode sees him making high art out of his grim story.
Nothing else in the film is quite so impressive, but Tarnation, whose $218 budget is already the stuff of legend, continues to find interesting things to do with each of its 88 minutes (the full two-and-a-half hour version must surely have been hard work).
A compelling story of a boy's love for his mother, an unintended meditation on the perils of voyeurism, and a celebration of the creative potential of digital technology, the picture will not be to everybody's taste, but its originality and vibrancy are undeniable.
