By Jakub Mejer (Poland)
Mitch is a schizophrenic, but he sees himself as an artist. ‘I write poems,’ he states early in the film. He’s also making a movie, a thing he’s eager to boast about when talking to girls he’s met in a bar. It doesn’t matter that they don’t believe him when he’s saying he’s shooting with his cellphone. He’s really making a movie.
Damir Čučić’s documentary Mitch: The Diary of a Schizophrenic is an edited and juxtaposed version of short films shot by Mišel Škorić, the eponymous character, while enduring the ups and downs of mental disability. Camerawork is often shaky, while most of the movie is a collage of low quality cellphone videos showing abstract, blurry or pixelated images that are often unrecognizable. The only thing that stands out are people, affected by some crude postproduction that turned them into surreal, Rotoscoped figures straight out of a poor man’s version of A Scanner Darkly (2006). The only person not resembling a cartoon is Mitch – when he turns the camera on himself he’s blurry and pixelated but also real, not surreal.
We see the titular character doing various activities he thought are worthwhile being shot – he’s smoking cigarettes, rapping, having fun with his friends in a mental hospital, complaining about his life, watching porn, planning what to do outside of the institution. When he’s released we become spectators of ethically dubious behavior – doing drugs or committing various crimes.
Watching Mitch might be morally disturbing. The main character, sometimes with his friends, is behaving strangely, doing things straight out of a Farrelly Brothers comedy. The problem is that this isn’t Jim Carrey or Will Ferrell – that’s a living person isolated in a Croatian hospital.
American journalist Janet Malcolm once wrote of a person in her profession being ‘kind of a confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like a credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction writing learns – when the article or book appears – his hard lesson’. This statement can be also used while talking about the non-fiction filmmaking. Audiences could have enormous fun watching Diary of a Schizophrenic, but we don’t know (and probably never will) if a main character is awareof their laughing at him—politically correct or otherwise. To this critic’s mind at least, they’re not laughing because Mitch is a great comedian.
