Tarnation

Tarnation is not a viewing experience which lends itself easily to definition, but you’d have to be pretty dumb, wilfully myopic or affectedly jaded not to recognise Jonathan Caouette‘s documentary as a soul-snatching, apocrypha-trafficking watershed. Simultaneously an autobiographical cine-scrapbook, a boy’s heartbreaking love letter to his mother and a screaming-comes-across-the-screen instant (appropriate that) post-modern classic, Tarnation was assembled from family home-movies, tape-recordings, video-diaries, stark inter-titles and pop-culture fragments to create a cubist portrait of the director as a young man, reflected primarily through his relationship with his mentally-traumatised mother, Renee.
Their story is tragic, baleful; a nightmarish spiral of mental illness. Following a brain injury in childhood, Renee found herself at the mercy of the archaic mental health practises of 1970s Texas – a steady diet of electro shock therapy and hospitalisation leaving her ill-equipped for motherhood. She lost Jonathan to the state authorities, but not before a boyfriend handed him a joint laced with PCP and formaldehyde, resulting in his lifelong disassociative disorder. Following a series of often abusive foster homes, he was adopted by his eccentric maternal grandparents who allowed him run wild through his colourful teenage years, mostly spent in goth-drag and playing underage hoochie in his native Houston’s gay bars.
As Tarnation opens, Jonathan – now aged 32 and living in New York with his nurturing boyfriend, David – journeys back to Texas to tend to Renee, as she recovers from a lithium overdose. There, he mothers the desperately unstable woman who, through no fault of her own, had been unable to parent him.
You may well think that a film offering a lithium overdose by way of overture, is surely headed nowhere pleasant, but you couldn’t be more wrong. Tarnation is far less a swan-dive than a dazzling bungee into the eye of a twister. Like El Greco’s stigmatism, Jonathan Caouette’s psychological condition is sadly, beautifully channelled into his formally breathtaking, gorgeously sound tracked (Cocteaus and Cave, etc) art. What could have been a work of assaulting narcissism and self-ploitation, instead offers salvation through love and gasping catharsis; a boy’s life laid bare in a brave and extraordinarily generous gesture.
It’s all good reader. It’s quite simply, one of the best films from this, or any other, year.

91mins. Cert IFI members. Opens April 29th.