Main Entry:        tar·na·tion
Pronunciation:        "tär-'nA-sh&n
Function:        noun
Etymology:        alteration of darnation, euphemism for damnation
DAMNATION -- often used as an interjection or intensive; often used with in:

Tarnation strike me -- James Joyce

Where in tarnation you from? -- Jessamyn West

Source: Merriam-Webster online

It is very rare nowadays for an indie film to break new ground or make a mark for itself in the flotsam and jetsam of what is truly extraordinary filmmaking. However Jonathan Caouette has achieved just that and did so for only $218.00 and change. You read correctly - two-hundred eighteen dollars!  His astonishing and amazing video diary cum soul searching documentary sets an unprecedented benchmark in independent filmmaking.

The 31-year-old filmmaker culled over twenty five years of home movies of various formats - video, Super 8mm, etc., snippets of pop culture and film and answering machine messages forms on his iMac into a unique pastiche of part home movie and part documentary about his childhood and specifically the relationship he has with his mother Renee LeBlanc, who has suffered a bout of staggering mental illness and life-long stays of institutionalization.

Jonathan's mother suffered some damage in a fall from a roof when she was an adolescent which led her parents, Adolph and Rosemary Davis, to unwittingly cause further damage by having her submitted to electric shock therapy which obviously has done considerable irreparable damage to her tragic psyche which includes the fact that Jonathan was shuttled from foster homes enduring physical abuse, mental cruelties from his by proxy foster parents and horrifically witnessing the brutal rape of his mother at the hands of a stranger during one of their countless attempts to make it on their own. Finally the Davises took Jonathan in to raise while the beautiful LeBlanc - whose brief marriage to Jonathan's father Steve ended when he left her unknowing she was pregnant - began her odyssey of nearly 25 years of the procedures that would ultimately make her a sad shell of what she used to be and more harrowing of what she could have become (her theatricalities invoking the spirit of Elizabeth Taylor clearly is transferred to her equally problematic son who welcomed all sorts of rebellion including drugs, the discovery of the video camera as a source of diary cum soul sharing - including a devastating 'acting' sequence at the tender age of 4 that has more than its share of autobiographical trappings - and his realization that as a gay boy in rural Texas his limits were indeed foreboding).

What is amazing is the visual content that comes and goes like the random thoughts of an average person pinpointing sequences of certain tell-tale events of one's life as well as the feverdream like existence Caouette has lived from his pseudoGoth teenage angst and anomie to a devoted son in at times terrifying and tender love affair with his mother (I mean spiritual and emotional, NOT physical) with some funny, piercing and overall poignant moments throughout from one extreme (the sad plight of his loving grandmother reduced to a permanent look of shock after a debilitating stroke to the unnervingly long stretch showing his mother obsessing over a pumpkin to an eerie dance and sing-song that a small child might chant  in playtime).

The film - such as it is - is a valentine from Jonathan to his mother that cracks open his soul exposing who he is and how he came to be who he is when he finally leaves Texas for New York City finding a loving boyfriend and ultimately a foregone conclusion that he is now his mother's keeper but not grudgingly so. The final sequence will truly lodge a lump in your throat if not your psyche.  Bittersweet, biting and raw like an exposed nerve the visuals may either overwhelm you or simply get under your skin but it never betrays the subject at hand: the power of love.

Film Rating: êêê1/2  (out of 4)