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Tarnation (2003)
Starring
Jonathan Caouette, Michael Cox
Produced by
Jonathan Caouette, Stephen Winter
Executive Producers
John Cameron Mitchell, Gus Van Sant
Distributor:
Wellspring
Official Website:
www.wellspring.com > Tarnation
Source: IMDB
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"I felt like Diana Ross in the last scene of "Mahogany" or "Lady Sings the Blues." It was so surreal and such an out-of-body experience. It felt like a flash was going to go off and everything was going to freeze frame and credits were going to roll and I was going to wake up from some elongated dream that I've been having."
- Jonathan Caouette on receiving the ovation at Cannes, from a BBC article
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What does $218 bucks, a borrowed Mac and years worth of low-grade camcorder footage get ya? If you’re Jonathan Caouette, a standing ovation at Cannes.
When the credits for "Tarnation" rolled at Cannes last week, the standing ovation reportedly lasted for over eight minutes. It was an acknowledgement of both the film - a moving, spastic, painfully honest document of human existence - and the circumstances behind the filming.
Shot, produced and edited for a ridiculously meager and oft-mentioned $218.32 over two decades of Jonathan Caouette's almost unbearably troubled young life and edited on the consumer-grade free editing program iMovie, the film makes Capturing the Friedmans look like a smarmy, feel-good trip down memory lane.
Part documentary, part hard-charging hyperkinetic avant-punk art film, Tarnation melds two decades worth of uncomfortably immediate footage of abuse, mental illness, drug use and shock treatment with experimental collage, a bizarre third-person/first-person narrative and a life’s worth of pop culture references.
The film and its director have been championed by Gus Van Sant, John Cameron Mitchell and, as of late, Roger Ebert, who made the wise but highly unlikely choice of making the film the centerpiece of his Champaign-based Overlooked Film Festival, as well as moderating a panel with Caouette on it at Cannes.
"Tarnation" is none too likely to be overlooked, particularly after the Sundance program called it a masterpiece, creating a near-deafening buzz around the project, which was ultimately picked up for distribution (supposedly later this year) by Wellspring.
Lost somewhere in that buzz is Caouette himself, a talented, hip, highly approachable thirty-something gay man who possessed unnatural talent from a very young age, when he performed as an abused southern woman for his own camera as a pre-adolescent and snuck into Houston goth clubs by posing as a girl.
With or without the indie cred stamp of approval from Van Sant and Mitchell, Caouette was schooled in underground music, theater and film at an uncomfortably young age, and the impact of that early sub-cultural immersion is part of what make the film so remarkable.
Particularly of note is the soundtrack to the movie, an astounding blend of indie rock, old-school country, folk and eighties pop from bands like Low, the Magnetic Fields, Dolly Parton and Bob Dylan that will reportedly cost close to half a million to clear for usage.
Caouette has been blessed with honesty, ingenuity and emotional intuition which, coupled with a keen pop culture sensibility, is exactly the reason why "Tarnation," a movie that cost mere hundreds, possesses infinitely more soul than a bumper crop of multi-million dollar summer blockbusters.
We made the trek to Champaign for the Overlooked Film festival specifically to see "Tarnation" and talk to Caouette about the perks and perils of being the no-budget It Boy.
At the festival, the reaction was nearly as strong as the one at Cannes, with throngs of highly emotional well-wishers surrounding Caouette after the screening, sharing tales of troubled childhoods and family mental illness with a sympathetic young man who seemed a little uncomfortable and a lot nervous about the newfound attention and intense outpouring of support.
Space in the Virginia Theater was a little tight, so we settled on a couple of seats in the far corner, in two strange raised chairs (remnants from a prior theater renovation) that reminded me a little of a shoeshine stand, to talk for a few minutes about the film.
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006: Jonathan Caouette
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