Review of Julien Donkey-Boy (1999) by Devlin R — 02 Sep 2014

Harmony Korine's sophomore film "Julien Donkey-Boy" is an ambitious piece of cinema to chew on for the average viewer but this is only because of it's ambitious subject matter. While rigorously documented in the medical world, Schizophrenia as presented in first person has never quite been fully developed maturely on film.

One of the issues with depicting this mental disorder on the screen is casting and Ewen Bremner as Julien could not have been better cast. We are lead into Julien's world through a variety of vignettes and lo-fi sequences that reveal the subtle complexities in Schizophrenic people.

Is the picture a pretty one? No. The audience is left with images that disturb, haunt, and frustrate. However, watering down this content or omitting it completely would fail the sensitive subject matter in every possible way.

As is the case with Korine's body of work, he is not haphazardly attaching an opinion on to his film but rather letting the cameras tell the story as is, untouched by the rigidity of traditional filmmaking (such as a definitive script, fully arched plot, and characters that must act a certain way).

Korine's film is a triumph of true representation and succeeds in shedding light, or purposeful dark, on a disorder that is rarely deeply depicted on screen.