Julien Donkey-Boy

Julien has untreated schizophrenia and lives with his family: a pregnant sister, a brother training to wrestle, and a father who drinks cough syrup and shouts at his children. The film tells no story. It shows a week inside that house in fragments. Harmony Korine wrote the character out of his own schizophrenic uncle. This was the sixth film made under the rules of Dogme 95 and the first from outside Europe. The rules mean available light, handheld camera and no added score, and the cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle turns the coarseness of early digital video into a style. Werner Herzog plays the father, and he really plays him: a man drinking syrup while listening to poetry in a gas mask. Ewen Bremner is Julien and Chloë Sevigny is his sister. The difficulty is that nothing is handed to you. The scenes are deliberately broken and the image is often degraded, and for some viewers the film sits uncomfortably close to exploiting its subject. Who it is for: people who seek out experimental cinema. Who it is not for: anyone who wants narrative and clarity.