Acute Schizophrenia Blues

In an effort to appear more edgy and unique, many recent films have advertised themselves as "experimental," regardless of trite plots and stale execution.

"Tarnation" sets itself apart in that it really is an experiment. Moreover, it's an experiment that works.

Filmmaker Jonathan Caouette began shooting "Tarnation" when he was 11. But at that point he was only a kid playing around with a borrowed Super-8 camera, filming dramatic monologues, short movies starring his family, and often just the world around him.

"Tarnation" is the finished product, a video scrapbook of the 19 years between then and now. Essentially, it's a feature-length home movie.

But don't let that scare you away. "Tarnation" is far from your standard home movie fare.

The documentary is the story of Caouette's mother, Renee Leblanc, a former model and actress who suffers from acute bipolar disorder and schizoaffective disorder.

Over the course of her life, Renee has been subjected to shock therapy, rape, marital abuse, and extended stays in archaic mental health institutions.

It's also the story of Jonathan, who, in addition to dealing with his troubled mother, was faced from a young age with abuse, sexual confusion, and a mental illness of his own-depersonalization disorder, a condition where nothing seems real to the person who has it.

It's a lot to take in at once, which is part of the reason why "Tarnation" is so hard to watch. You can't help but squirm when an eleven-year-old Jonathan films himself delivering a monologue as a horribly abused women who killed her husband. Equally uncomfortable is watching Renee unable to control her laughter in response to jokes that only she understands.

The style of the film is just as jarring. Caouette edited all his footage using only iMovie software. The end result is something that is charmingly amateur and shockingly personal. Caouette uses fast-paced visuals and quick cuts with the intention of letting the audience see his life the way he sees it.

And it's not always pretty. After an hour and a half of piecing together fragments, struggling to discern what is real, we feel the same sense of disorientation that characterizes Jonathan's disorder.

That "Tarnation" is difficult to sit through is not a flaw, but rather a strength. This in-your-face realism makes it almost impossible to distance yourself from what you're watching, in a way most big-budget blockbusters can't. For an hour and a half, you have adopted Jonathan's family as your own.

But no experiment goes exactly as planned, and there is always some need for revision. If Caouette were to do it all over again, he might be better off leaving out the few scenes in which he recreates actual events in the style of home movies. It's an admirable effort, but the stark contrast between the real and the fabricated is distracting.

As is usually the case with home movies, "Tarnation" is an incredibly emotionally draining experience. But, for both the filmmaker and the audience, it is one that in the end proves cathartic.

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