Tarnation Part 2: Jonathan Caouette’s Cloudbusters

Sometime in 2004 Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation made me crawl in a ball and not want to visit the outside world for a good week (read my 4.5 out of 5 star review). Round two is coming soon. Part of Wild Bunch’s sales slate, the experimental-documentary film titled Cloudbusters (which I imagine is related to what you might do on a road trip) might be ready in time for a return to the Croisette (Tarnation was part of the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar). Read Wild Bunch’s synopsis after the jump.

Caouette plunges us again into a psychedelic maelstrom fused from snapshots, super 8 home movies, answerphone messages, intimate video diaries and dreamlike landscapes of events both past and future, real and imagined, to createa multilayered portrait of an American family shaken by crisis but united by love. In 2010, he decided to film his mother Renée’s move from a care home in Houston to another in New York, where she would be nearer to him. Their road trip – mother and son travelling across the States by truck transitions seamlessly into episodes of wild hallucinatory fiction and musical interludes. At its heart, CLOUDBUSTERS is a radically shot and edited story of one person caring for another in difficult, and often bizarre circumstances. Jonathan alone takes charge of the vulnerable Renée while struggling to maintain his own stability and to follow his path as a filmmaker and as a father to his son Joshua.