Critics reviews

Watching Tarnation, we’re not just staring at a life; we’re inside the emotional flow of Jonathan Caouette’s memory system. The movie is a holy technological poem, a collage of suffering, revelation, and perseverance in which Caouette tries to make sense of the torments that shaped his existence.

Tarnation is, in other words, an unusual and frequently arresting film. But it is also a troubling one... it's true that the director's handsome features take up more than their share of screen time in a film that is ostensibly about his mother. But the deeper problems with Tarnation concern its authenticity as a documentary.

Tarnation is without self-pity. Caouette is able to view his life with astonishing objectivity as a kind of comedy, and the film is more openly matter-of-fact than coyly confessional.

Sad, disturbing, but ultimately cathartic, Tarnation is a unique and unforgettable experience. Rarely has a director been so brave and passionate, and never has a film seemed so brutally honest and real.

Tarnation's psychedelic visual style, with its rapid-fire editing, saturated colours and split screens is no cheap gimmick: the disorientating images reflect the disordered mental states of both Caouette and his mother Renee, a former beauty queen who was subject to repeated bouts of Electric Shock Therapy.

It is in turns exhausting, confusing, engrossing and alienating, and inspires stimulating questions about the ethics of truth and privacy in documentary-making... But, to my mind, Caouette is innocent of voyeurism or exploitation: this is a highly personal project born of a childish desire to understand the world through cinema. Unhealthy, perhaps. But never invalid and always intoxicating.

Visually audacious and emotionally wrenching, this is never an easy watch. But its candour, intricacy, affection and occasional histrionics make for compelling viewing.

Adhering firmly to the adage that the "recorded life" is the only one worth living, Caouette is very much a child of the video-camera generation, a reality-TV star avant la lettre whose dreams of showbiz success are here encapsulated in the world's most elaborate and self-lacerating audition-reel.

Characterized by a detachment from one's own mental processes, Caouette's condition results in the sensation of being an outside observer of one's life. This, in fact, is where "Tarnation" makes its most powerful impact. For, in a sense, there are two Jonathan Caouettes - the filmmaker and the filmmaker's subject - and the former underscores this idea over and over again by the frequent use of split-screen imagery of the latter.

What the film offers, if you can get past the vanity inherent in much of it, is a glimpse of a reality that almost never makes it into drama. There's a sense of how some people turn out badly, and how some dreams don't come true, that's exceedingly powerful. You may not want to hang with the haunted Caouettes, but the movie is so compelling, it doesn't give you a choice.

Despite the journey one takes through the horrendous episodes of his life, Tarnation leaves the viewer in a positive state of mind. Not only has Caouette emerged from his childhood amazingly unscarred, his movie renews faith in the ability of art to carry us through the rough patches and elevate the spirit.

Caouette should have dipped a little less often into his bag of editing tricks: busier isn't always better. But that's a modest flaw in the face of what he's achieved, a lacerating portrait of a family in free-fall.