A life lost in Tarnation

From director Jonathan Caouette comes Tarnation, a disturbing, lovely and visceral look into the inner workings of his own damaged family.

Caouette traces the path of his mother, Renee LeBlanc, a beautiful child model in 1960s Texas. The film explains everything in her life was happy, via singsong day-glo subtitles, until she fell off the roof of her parent's house, resulting in temporary paralysis. Convinced that her condition was mental, Renee's parents, Adolph and Rosemary, authorized doctors to give Renee shock treatments. This would begin a lifetime of sporadic hospitalization for Renee, which would profoundly impact the lives of all surrounding her, including her son.

Tarnation could have been an indictment of the 1960s mental health practices of Texas, but it is much more concerned with presenting the reality/unreality of the people who grew from this troubled mix of circumstances. The system becomes all the more real because the audience gets to know its very real victims.

After spending his early years in abusive foster homes, Caouette eventually goes to live with Adolph and Rosemary, and begins filming his surroundings at age 11 with a neighbor's borrowed video camera. Young Jonathan is introduced through his harrowing - one imagines improvised - character monologues to the camera. He is a young, abused mother; he is a drug-addicted diva. He is evidently a beautiful, creative, intense child struggling with realities that would be too much for most adults. Jonathan is captivated by his mother's inner and outer beauty, and his camera finds it in her, even as she slips further and further away from the smiling, raven-haired girl in the black and white photographs.

Tarnation is at times difficult to watch; it is both raw and stylized, and the balance can be unnerving. The footage paints heartbreaking portraits with an unmerciful brand of tenderness. In saying, "this is what happened to us," Caouette's careful depiction always separates the "us" from the "what happened" as only a survivor could. Jonathan himself suffers from depersonalization disorder, which he describes as having the feeling that one is in a dream all the time.

In Tarnation, Jonathan depicts his world as he sees it. A color-soaked, rapid barrage of stylized images, emotions, people, TV show clips, snippets of Jonathan's early films, photographs and music weave together into an intensely personal quest for understanding of the intangible past and tremulous present.