***/****
written and directed by Jonathan Caouette
by Bill Chambers Stylistically falling somewhere between avant-garde and dog's-breakfast, Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation invents an ethos to go along with the name of the editing software, "iMovie," used to assemble it, giving us what feels like the world's first "I" movie. The film doesn't so much defy description as resist it (Frank Zappa's "dancing about architecture" maxim applies here), but clearly a summary shouldn't be discouraged, as the more subjective the work, the greater the chance it stands of becoming the salvation of some disenfranchised individual. (Caouette himself says he was relieved to find an empathetic view of queer street life in Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho.) Though it begins with an obviously staged scene of Caouette learning of his schizophrenic mother's lithium overdose, followed by a credits sequence that bills its documentary subjects as actors (these formal concessions likely helping Caouette to keep a modicum of intellectual distance), Tarnation, perhaps the next logical step in the evolution of the personal memoir (which has hit something of a cul-de-sac in literary circles), is a video collage of home movies and found footage that linearly but impressionistically retraces Caouette's tormented family history. Authentic where someone like Harmony Korine feels touristic, Caouette effortlessly conveys the self-fulfilling lucklessness of the underprivileged, and, thanks to an eclectic pop soundtrack, with Tarnation he turns his life into the rock opera he always wanted it to be. (Hedwig himself, John Cameron Mitchell, came on board as a co-producer, as did Van Sant.) But the Job-like Caouette's deck is so stacked politically–he's a gay, experimental filmmaker who's secured distribution for a $219 production–that I do wonder if it's possible to review Tarnation without fearing that you're complimenting the emperor on his new wardrobe. Programme: Visions
