Walk Away Renée

Walk Away Renée repeats the formula of Jonathan Caouette’s brilliant debut, Tarnation. Yet, this time the author directed the camera at his mother suffering from a bipolar disorder. Just like in Tarnation, the author constructs the story from archive materials, his own home movies, tapes recorded by the friends of the family and pictures from his travels with the mother taken during her move from Texas to New York (which constitute film's structure, thus allowing for treating it as one of the road movies). We are knocked out from a dreary state of depression over cruel reality by psychedelic commercials of a religious gathering called Cloudbusters, exploding with special effects; a gathering in the ‘arms’ of which Renée found her assuagement. And although some of contemporary shots seem a bit stilted and artificial, the result is nearly as touching as the director's debut breaking the boundaries between documentary and fiction. Renée in her helplessness inspires pity but at the same time she can be obnoxious and malicious, and the spectator shares these feelings with the son, who, as a matter of fact, speaks about himself again…