There could hardly be a more vivid time-capsule film about the publicly funded British arts scene in the early 1990s than this engrossing fly-on-the-wall documentary about Derek Jarman and his movie Edward II. Based on the play by Christopher Marlowe, it is about the 14th-century English king and his love affair with his court favourite, Piers Gaveston, with Steven Waddington and Andrew Tiernan as the leads and Tilda Swinton as Queen Isabella. This film uses the tremendously funny and candid making-of footage shot at the time by Seamus McGarvey, who had worked as a camera assistant on earlier Jarman films War Requiem and The Garden, and whose distinguished career as a cinematographer lay ahead.
Jarman emerges as an effortless leader with a beaming patrician authority, rather like David Lean or Richard Attenborough, the kind of chief whom subordinates instinctively wish to please while keeping from him the grubby problems that they themselves have to deal with, such as paying quarrelsome extras or handling tabloid press questions. Jarman had had his HIV diagnosis for five years at this stage, managing the situation with meds which McGarvey’s camera notices. Jarman’s tightly budgeted movie was composed in the formalised theatrical setpiece style that Peter Greenaway favoured in the same period; he intended a radically confrontational piece of Brechtian queer cinema, reinventing the Marlowe play as a movie insurgency against homophobia, Section 28, the (declining but still present) indifference to HIV/Aids research, and age-of-consent inequality.
Jarman used Peter Tatchell’s OutRage! protesters as extras in the movie studio, effectively making the film and the street protests part and parcel of each other. This was to lead to one of the most bizarre and chaotic footnotes in British movie history, amusingly shown here in all its uproarious craziness: the OutRage! shock troops stormed into the studios next door where Cliff Richard happened to be rehearsing, demanding that he out himself. The “outing” debate now in fact looks very dated and this is the one moment where you can sense that Jarman thinks that the OutRage! protesters got it wrong by harassing and bullying Cliff Richard; we see him assuring his own team later that Tatchell gave them a real telling off for this. (Did Tatchell actually do anything of the kind?
Or is that what Jarman felt ought to have happened?) It’s an absorbing and affecting portrait of a dedicated artist at work.
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