Fussing repetitively with a lock of blond hair, nervously flashing an incomplete set of front teeth, the figure on screen begins to cough up her "testimony" in the accents of a Southern trailer court. The story that spills from her sounds all too familiar--the boot in her stomach while she was pregnant, the gun muzzle shoved against her head, the sound of her husband shouting, "I'm gonna kill you, bitch!"--but the speaker herself is a novelty, and is perhaps more devastating than any incident she relates. "Hillary," as she calls herself, is actually an 11-year-old Houston boy named Jonathan Caouette. You are watching a scene he improvised in 1984 before a home videocamera.

Few boys his age would have chosen this character for their role-playing, or could even have conceived of her. What's heartbreaking about Jonathan--and impressive--is that he turned himself into Hillary with true conviction. How did a kid get access to such emotions? By the time this scrap of footage comes up in Caouette's sensational film-memoir Tarnation, you know the unfortunate answer, having experienced the beginnings of his story and his mother's.

A New York-based actor and filmmaker who is now in his early 30s, Caouette put Tarnation together from some twenty years' worth of his home videos, plus scrapbook photographs, audiocassette diaries, saved answering-machine tapes, favorite pop songs, clips from movies and TV shows and a few sections of recently shot footage (both documentary and staged). Emerging from this assemblage--which is more collage than montage--are three stories in one: Caouette's tales of the calamities of a lower-middle-class household, the education of a Texas gay boy and the formation, at last, of a redemptive new family.

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