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A testament born of love and pain, Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation, famously made for $218 and edited on iMovie software, is stimulating and provocative cinema, whose humble means are entirely insignificant against the weight of raw, unflinching emotional honesty invested in the project. Using home movie footage, snapshots, answering machine messages and video diaries, Caouette creates a patchwork film held together by the need to reclaim his mother from the electrotherapy that so radically changed her. As a family, their story is a catalogue of misery that would be on the edge of parody were it not true – paralysis after a fall, rape, an absent father, hospitalization, beatings in foster care, a depersonalization disorder and suicide attempts. As a film, it resembles something like a hallucinogenic, buzzed-up mix of the worlds of George Kuchar, Pierre et Gilles and Joe Dallesandro with Caouette telling his story in the third person. This is fresh and compulsive cinema, sometimes hard to watch but finally emblematic of a large heart that delivers a hopeful ending, all the more beautiful for its conditions of nurture: ‘Be at peace with your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world’.

 

Graeme Hobbs on 28th June 2005
View all 252 of Graeme Hobbs's reviews