Director: Derek Jarman
Screenplay: Derek Jarman
Starring: Tilda Swinton, Nigel Terry, Spencer Leigh, Jonathan Philips, 'Spring' Mark Adley
Running Time: 87 minutes
Genre: Experimental
This plotless, experimental film is a kind of collage of sound and images exploring Jarman's feelings about the decay of Britain during the 1980s, which he believed was increasingly homophobic and repressive. The film mixes Jarman's old home movies, new footage shot in shaky hand held, and more documentary style footage. The sound track mixes classical music, punk, folk and features performers such as Simon Turner, Marianne Faithful and Diamanda Galás. This is a difficult film to really enjoy. It's inaccessible, and strangely dated. This is a "state of the nation" film, and it is about the 1980s for a 1980s audience, and really if you are unfamiliar with the political and social scene in '80s Britain then it will be even less accessible. Jarman creates some starling and provocative imagery and some sequences are really dynamic, however a lot of the film is baffling. There are repeated grainy images of urban wastelands, and derelict housing and industrial estates, Tilda Swinton tears a wedding dress she is wearing on a beach with fires burning, two soldiers make love on a Union Jack, civilians are gunned down by masked gunmen, there is a bizarre sequence that plays like a rock video, and Nigel terry sonorous voice over reads from T. S. Elliot's "The Hollow Men" and Allen Ginsberg's "Howl". It is certainly a work of art, which I don't think was ever intended to be "enjoyable". I found it infuriating, provocative, occasionally brilliant and often dull.
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