Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #33741 in DVD
• Released on: 2001-04-16
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Aspect ratio: 1.77:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Anamorphic, PAL, Widescreen
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 94 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
There's going to be no middle-ground in your opinion of Harmony Korine's second film Julien Donkey Boy--it's either a blazing, daring masterpiece or one of the worst movies ever made. Ewen Bremner, the gawkiest of the Trainspotting gang, transforms himself into the terrifying yet pathetic Julien, with curly black hair, removable teeth, a letter-perfect American maniac accent and the body language of the truly demented. Julien is a schizophrenic but rather than observe his mental problems the film chooses to crawl inside them--we're never sure how much of what we see is actually happening and none of the "sane" characters make much sense either. Julien's family consists of a brother (Evan Neuman) who is constantly climbing stairs like a lizard to beef himself up for a contest that turns out to be ridiculous, a pregnant sister (Chloe Sevigny) who sometimes phones him up pretending to be their dead mother and a hard man father (Werner Herzog) who douses him with freezing water to toughen him up and delivers a bizarrely sincere soliloquy about the superiority of the ending of Dirty Harry over Julien's pretentious improvised poem. Though it comes with a certificate of authenticity from the Danish Dogma 95 movement, it violates several of the cardinal rules of their manifesto epitomised by Festen and The Idiots: there is unsourced music on the soundtrack, special effects in the form of pixellated or freeze-frame images and action as family arguments explode into scrum-like fights (Korine's directorial debut, Gummo, was closer in spirit to the movement). It opens and closes with the tragic deaths of children, but is mostly a shapeless series of scenes that deliver an impression of madness rather than a story. Bits of it are undeniably irritating, just as mad people usually are, but there are lucid flashes where Korine gets his cast to focus on their characters and provide great scenes. --Kim Newman

Special Features
Anamorphic Wide Screen
DVD 5
English
Region 0
Dolby Digital English
Dolby Digital
The Making Of Julian Donkey Boy
Star And Director Filmographies
2 Deleted Scenes
Trailer
Film Review
Scene Selection

Synopsis
Flashing a mouthful of fake gold teeth, Julien (Ewen Bremner) wanders the streets of New York City, mumbling nonsensical syllables to himself. He tries to avoid the abuse of his sadistic drunken gas-mask-wearing father (German director Werner Herzog). He cracks a young boy's head open with a rock. He befriends a blind figure skater. He wears a bra and underwear as he wrestles with his younger brother. And his sister, Pearl (Chloe Sevigny), is pregnant--with Julien's child.

Writer-director Harmony Korine succeeds remarkably well in showing the world through Julien's eyes: a schizophrenic kaleidoscope of images--some hauntingly beautiful, some disturbing and violent. The first American film made in accordance with the Danish filmmaking manifesto Dogma 95 (which also includes THE CELEBRATION and MIFUNE), JULIEN DONKEY-BOY uses no cinematic tricks such as artificial lighting or studio sound. Shot on handheld digital video, the film was transferred to 16mm stock before being blown up to 35mm film for the final print. Korine used this unique method to give the film the low-definition, degraded look of an old Super-8 home movie. Pushing the envelope further, Korine rejects classic narrative storytelling in favor of a more poetic succession of scenes. The result is a gritty, surreal collage that powerfully and touchingly evokes the schizophrenic experience as few films have.

Customer Reviews

Poignant study of personal and family decay
A touching tale of a young man's attempts to understand the world around him through the hazed glasses of psychosis. Beginning and ending with images of an ice-skater, the film explores the juxtaposition between such beauty and freedom of form with the harsh reality of life.
Julien, the main character, suffers not only from schizophrenia, but also the brutality of life which has drawn deeply on his dysfuntional family. A harsh, severe father gives his children confused and ambiguous lessons on life, most beautifully countered by Julien's poem "Morning chaos, evening chaos, night chaos", which surmises his existence tersely.
In the face of this, the children draw strength from each other; Julien's pregnant sister pretends to be his dead mother over the telephone to comfort him. The pregnancy itself is shrouded in mystery, with undertones of an incestuous affair. Julien's claiming of the resultant stillborn child as his is, I feel, best taken as a metaphor for an unholy love, a product of their shared existence, and a statement of their future. In this way, it may be felt to echo David Lynch's 'Eraserhead', and indeed the main protagonists hurt by and for the world resonate deeply with each other.
A beautiful movie, a parable of the struggle and difficulty of life.

Morning Chaos Noon Chaos Midnight Chaos
Chloe Sevigny, Ewan Bremner, Werner Herzog and Harmony Korine have hip movie pedigrees but nothing prepares you for a film where blind bowlers bowl, black albinos rap, little brothers wrestle wheelie-bins and fathers do like yoga in gas masks. And Julien washes his "gold fronts" (removable teeth) in his lemonade. I suggest you see this film.

She Sings, Walking Through A Field.
Julien Donkey-Boy is the muted and bleak tale of a young schizophrenic and his family. Set mostly in their house and filmed in Harmony Korine's grandmother's New York home in true John Cassavettes style, the film shows Julien's struggle to cope with the harshness of his condition and the world's refusal to accept him. Much like Korine's other work Gummo, the film is not concerned with the ideas of plot or linearity and really neither of these concepts have any place in something which identifies so closely with its insane protagonist. The language of the film illustrates this: with its combination of jump-cuts, spy camera shots and grainy, degraded stock we get a sense of Julien's distorted and uncertain view of reality.
The existence of film as one certified by the Danish Dogme 95 movement isn't really very important, firstly because the movement doesn't really maintain much influence or importance now and secondly because Korine broke most of the rules or interpreted them to fit what he wanted to happen and at least in its approach and its style it remains simply a Harmony film and therefore isn't like anything else.
Mostly improvised from a skeletal outline of scenes Julien follows the protagonist as he works at a home for the blind and lives with family: his caring, motherly sister Pearl, played sweetly by Chloe Sevigny, his brother Chris, an aspiring wrestler, his tyrannical, bizarre father (German director and central Korine influence, Werner Herzog) and his foreign grandmother who seems close to senile. Julien's mother is dead and Pearl is pregnant with Julien's child. Herzog's father figure rules the family with a hand that seems at first comical- with his whimsical stories of the state dinner between the Queen and USSR leader Brezhnev and Dirty Harry- but by the film's end turns into something approaching manical and violent.
Ewen Bremner's performance as Julien is the film's central success. Unrecognisable from the other characters he has portrayed, like Spud in Trainspotting, and completely immersed in the world of the man he is playing, he gives Julien incredible depth and makes us sympathise with him despite the more terrible aspects of his nature- at the start of the film he kills a small boy, this is never mentioned again. His Scots accent is lost behind a fuzz of garbled speech and verbal tics and obscured by a wall of golden teeth.
Julien himself is incredibly conflicted by things he cannot control- he is tremendously sweet and childlike and kind to his sister and brother but also, however fleetingly, shows a great capacity for cruelty and brutality, much like his father.
Where the film perhaps fails only a technical aspect. The use of spy cameras to 'steal something real' as Korine said, ultimately does very little and only in one of the ending scene on the bus does it fully succeed in doing Korine apparently intended. Where it beats the majority of films is that has an incredibly powerful sense of mood and atmosphere. It is pervaded by an intangible gloom and melancholy aided by the wintry cinematography and recurring use of a mournful aria and traditional music. Julien's existence is one without hope where he is caught by a desire to return to safer childhood memories and escape the torment in his life as a young man.
Ultimately he is without hope and looks for solace in religion. However, as in his conversation with the priest at confessional (admittedly another spy camera sequence) it can offer him no more actual answers than anything else. As the film progresses it recedes further and deeper into its womb of darkness, before reaching one of the most terrible conclusions on film. His relationship with his sister and his interactions with a blind little girl ice skater called Christy provide the only light within the film although much of it humourous and touching.
And whilst parts of it do nothing- the albino rap battle at the home for the blind- certain scenes like the sweeping movements on the ice rink, Julien washing Christy's feet and Pearl's dreamy singing through a corn field glowing with golden light are unmistakably beautiful.
Moving away from the more shocking aspects of Gummo, Korine has still created something as desolate and as moving, a piece that retains its best aspects with being a repetition.
Its landscapes of a haunting, snow-covered Queens combine with this to form something of great power, again coming from something deeply personal to Korine: he dedicates the film to his schizophrenic Uncle Eddie. So Julien Donkey-Boy is not a pointless or tasteless affair like Gummo supposedly was or an aimless, plain one like critics claimed but one that works on many levels and proves Korine's obvious talent and maturity as a film maker.
Although certain parallels could be drawn to other works- Herzog's Aguirre is refrenced, and there are vague thematic similarities with the Enigma Of Kasper Hauser- it stands alone as the most honest and unflinching illustration of what schizophrenia really is and what it does to those with it. Watching it is a rigorous and powerful experience.
Julien Donkey-Boy displays that Korine is far more than a hip accessory for the useless but an illustration of how talentless the majority of modern filmakers are. Ultimately most people will refuse to accept the film and the most pertinent comparison is between Korine and the film industry and modern audiences which have shunned him much as everyone else shuns his protagonist. I suppose this is to be expected in a world where Meryl Streep is acclaimed as a great actress and Korine is derided for shoving her on a chat show... she deserved it, most people don't deserve Julien Donkey-Boy.