CANNES – One of the most buzzed-about flicks at the Cannes Film Festival is “Tarnation,” a mind-blowing, edgy autobiographical documentary by a 31-year-old who lives in Astoria, Queens.
Director Jonathan Caouette has been getting standing ovations for his revealing film, which chronicles the roller-coaster ride of his troubled childhood.
Caoutte’s surname roughly translates in French to “Peanuts” – quite appropriate for a filmmaker who claims he spent a grand total of $213.32 on his opus.
Caouette told The Post he spent just three weeks using his desktop computer to edit 20 years worth of his home videos and photographs into a spellbinding, harrowing and hugely inspiring story – at the same time as he was working as a doorman at a Japanese store on Fifth Avenue.
“It was the most cathartic thing I’ve done in my life,” he said.
“One day, a year ago, it occurred to me I had this gold mine sitting on my shelves, and I started making notes while I was standing up working as a doorman.”
Caouette, who was born in Texas, was raised mostly in foster homes and by his grandparents after his father abandoned him and his schizophrenic mother spent years in and out of institutions – the result of electroshock treatments she was given after she fell off a roof as a child.
As a youngster, Caouette saw his mother get raped, endured physical abuse, dabbled with drugs, suffered from depersonalization disorder (he saw his own life as an outsider) – and was institutionalized himself several times.
He eventually moved to New York, straightened out his life and became an actor – he now lives with in Astoria with his boyfriend and his mother, whose care he took charge of after she almost died of a lithium overdose.
“I had one woman stop me on the way out of the premiere and tell me people were applauding not only because they liked my movie but because I was still alive after all this,” said Caouette.
“Tarnation,” which is done in the style of ’60s underground movies, was picked up for distribution by Wellspring and will be released stateside this fall.
Caouette noted there were eerie parallels between his film and “The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things,” a feature based on a cult autobiographical book by J.T. Leroy that is also one of the most talked-about movies in Cannes – though the consensus is it’s one of the worst.
Director Asia Argento – her father is the famous Italian horror director Dario Argento and she was the female lead in “XXX” – also plays perhaps the most horrific mother this side of Joan Crawford in “Mommie Dearest.”
Argento, who has been signed to play Courtney Love in an upcoming film biography of Kurt Cobain, already seems to be channeling Love in her portrayal of a drug-using truck-stop hooker who yanks her son out of a loving foster home and subjects him to every conceivable form of mental, physical and sexual abuse.
She even dresses her 11-year old son in drag as a hooker – much to the delight of her current boyfriend, played by rocker Marilyn Manson, who has his way with the son.
There’s a certain car-wreck fascination with this over-the-top mess, which also features less-than-distinguished acting turns by Peter Fonda as Argento’s Bible-thumping father, and Winona Ryder, in her first post-arrest role, as a shrink who tries to bully the son into feeling better.
Child abuse is a running theme at this year’s festival, which ends tomorrow – there’s Kevin Bacon as a child molester in “The Woodsman,” and “Moolade,” an ecstatically received African film about youngsters trying to evade female genital mutilation.
Perhaps the best of the bunch is Pedro Almodovar’s sublime “Bad Education,” which uses the sexual abuse of a schoolboy by a priest as the springboard for a complex film noir.
It features a tour de force by Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal as a drag queen who serves as a femme fatale. The fest’s hottest actor, Bernal also stars in Cannes as the young Che Guevara in Walter Salles’ brilliant “Motorcycle Diaries.”