The Blog
Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation sequel WALK AWAY RENEE follows the filmmaker and his mentally ill mother, Renee Le Blanc, on a road trip from Texas to New York. Unlike its title the film is much about Jonathan facing his mother’s mental illness and gives an insight into this extraordinary relationship.
One problem for me was that the film was too rooted into to the back story and the introduction, practically a Tarnation summary, takes a big chunk of time. As part of the road trip movie there is an added dramatic story line - Rene loosing her medication and Jonathan having to deal with it on the road - which feels a bit artificial. Apart from that the use of montage and psychedelic sequences are very powerful and the film is a provokingly honest personal documentary, definitely worth seeing!
