Julien Donkey-Boy (1999, Harmony Korine)

Following his avant-garde 'white trash' art-film debut, "Gummo" (1997) - a piece of work that I personally retain an immense amplitude of reverence toward, due to it's complex undertones and wildly stark representation of hellish redneck lifestyles - Harmony Korine dabbled in similarly offbeat material. "Julien Donkey-Boy" is Korine's attempt to uphold the ridiculous Danish 'Dogme 95' movement of the organically restricting "Vow of Chastity" by abiding by their usual set of rules, including constant handheld camera work, use of natural lighting, lack of formative genre customs, etc. The film was shot on a DV cassette and transferred to 16mm THEN transferred to 35mm, which gives the look of it a distorting, worn out graininess and faded lack of color.

The plot - like "Gummo" - is a very non-linear slice-of-life that is full of ugly, mentally deranged characters, such as Julien, a retarded schizophrenic religious zealot. He lives in New York with his pregnant sister (whom we're led to believe is carrying her brother's child), their domineering German father who dedicates most of his time to whipping his other son into shape to become a "winner" he can be proud of... And also attempting to pay him ten dollars to put on his dead mother's dress at one point...

For the most part, you're just getting Korine's usual brand of seemingly senseless, yet disturbing and aesthetically striking moments involving a black albino rapping about the obviously unfortunate hand he's been dealt in life, Werner Herzog dancing around in a gas mask and drinking cough syrup out of a slipper, Julien washing a little blind girl's feet in a bathtub, being told off by a Hasidic Jew child and stealing a deceased fetus from the hospital...

This series of exceptionally odd events certainly have a hypnotically provocative magnetism, though it all tends to come across as a more 'over-blown' rendering of Harmony Korine's unique visionary auteurism; illustrated well in his previous effort, "Gummo". While that film actually maintained a palpable sense of Korine's cinematic nihilism and unconventional take on story-telling, "Julien Donkey-Boy" comes across as a much more pretentious and fairly uninvolved film. The passion that Harm clearly had for his first film isn't found in nearly the same capacity with this one and, for the most part, it really just comes across as a boisterous freak-show with a much more shallow undercurrent of interpretive nuance and memorable strangeness. I almost wanna blame it one Korine's choice to earn his "Dogme 95" certificate which might have led to the outcome muddling the director's intentions somewhat. That's probably not the case, however... I dunno.

Despite all this, the film is not without it's stand-out strong points, such as Ewen Bremner's performance as Julien, which is pretty fucking incredible and actually based off of Korine's schizoid Uncle Eddy, whom he required Bremner to study in his preparation for the role. A scene is which Julien and his sister talk on the phone from separate rooms of their house as she comfortingly speaks to him as their dead mother from beyond the grave as he fondles himself is a notably harrowing scene that is solely performance driven. Chloë Sevigny as the prego sister is very good too. Herzog, however, steals the show in every scene he's in - whether he is yelling at his son for wrestling a plastic trash receptacle or using the term "artsy-fartsy" numerous times before breaking down a scene from "Dirty Harry" and equating it to REAL poetry.

In all, "Julien Donkey-Boy" didn't reach the same level of cinematic rebellion that Harmony Korine displayed with his 'white trash' Vaudevillian-influenced nightmare "Gummo" (and hasn't come close to since his debut film), though this is still a worthy film for Korine fans and 'arthouse' lovers. Again, it's a little highfalutin, but worth checking out.