EDWARD II
A film review by Frank Maloney
Copyright 1992 Frank Maloney
EDWARD II is a film by Derek Jarman, written by Jarman, Stephen McBride, and Ken Butler, based on the play by Christopher Marlowe. It stars Steven Waddington, Kevin Collins, Andrew Tiernan, Jody G. Raber, Jerome Flynn, Tilda Swinton, and Nigel Terry. Art direction by Christopher Hobbs. The film is rated R for violence and sexual situations.
EDWARD II is Jarman's ninth feature film and it's a stunner. You will either love it or hate it. There is no middle ground here. Jarman, the director of SEBASTIANE, CARAVAGGIO, JUBILEE, and THE TEMPEST, is in no mood to shilly-shally here and has produced an angry, provocative film, a polemic against homophobia, agit-prop, radical propaganda. I think it is very good theater; I don't think that it's perfect film-making, however much I applaud its politics.
The only problem I have is that EDWARD II looks like a filmed stage play, not like a movie, except for the fast-paced editing. The minimalist sets, designed by Christopher Hobbs, consist of slablike blocks and walls; there are no exteriors at all. This is a response to Jarman's shoestring budget, but it must always be a fault in film. This is not to say the sets are ineffective; they communicate the primitive world of Plantagenet England (Edward II ruled from 1307-1327), the even more primitive world of power politics and bloody hatreds that are not, unfortunately, so bound by time. The costumes are mostly contemporary. Edward and his lover Piers Gaveston appear in dark, stylish suits and ties, the Queen Isabella (Tilda Swinton) stalks through the entire movie as a fashion parade of campy haute couture fashion, the rebellious Mortimer (Nigel Terry) wears the uniform of a British officer, right down the bristly little mustache.
Jarman never stops reminding us that this is not just a costume flick, that this is about now, that it is happening now. The most blatant exercise of this insistence is the battle scene that becomes a confrontation between OutRage activists with very contemporary placards and riot police with truncheons and plastic shields. (The extras were real-life members of OutRage, a British group somewhat akin to ACT-Up in the U.S.)
The language, however, is purely Marlowe's, although Jarman and his co-writers use only a third of the 1592 play. The writers have several characters repeat the question "How can you love what the rest of the world hates?" (remembered approximately). How indeed? Is this the crux? The antique blank verse and modern costumes fuse powerfully at this moment to open the play and the film to the largest possible scope of meaning.
Jarman also does something very interesting with the ending, which he rewrites for Marlowe. It can be justified from contemporary documents, I am told, and it certainly can be justified from the political demands of the movie. Marlowe's ending is foreshadowed throughout the action and is enacted in all its brutality and then thrown away as a bad dream. Instead, we have a symbol of what happens when the oppressed help each other, instead of the oppressors, as moving in its own way as the ending to the novel THE GRAPES OF WRATH.
As for the performances, let me say first off that I deeply appreciate the care and precision with which the British actors spoke Marlowe's words. I understood every one of them, not something one can usually say, especially with U.S. productions of Elizabethan drama. The lovers, Waddington as Edward and Tiernan as Gaveston, were energetic, impudent, imprudent, and very passionate, without chewing any scenery. However, Swinton as the Queen steals the entire movie. She took Best Actress at Venice and deservedly. She has the carriage of a runway fashion model, slinking, slouching, projecting her bony shoulders like leathern wings. She is passionate, too, and much more dangerous than any of the males; she doesn't quite eat her mate, but she comes as close as possible, familially speaking.
When Gaveston and Edward part, we head Annie Lennox's version of Cole Porter's "Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye" from the AIDS fund-raiser album, "Red, Hot & Blue." Lennox then appears and gives us a new interpretation of this beautiful song, bringing out its quiet sadness. (Jarman came out in 1987 when he announced he was HIV+. Since then the British press, in particular, has mounted a death watch on each of his films, WAR WORKS, THE GARDEN, and now EDWARD II; Jarman, by all reports, continues to be creative and productive, despite a series of opportunistic infections last year.)
I don't have the name of Jarman's cinematographer. I should because the film is beautifully shot, relying on carefully arranged tableaux vivants and chiaroscuro lighting, as it does in the main, the effects are stagey but visually rich.
I kept thinking of Peter Greenaway throughout this film, that despite the contrast of Jarman's stripped down sparseness and modern-dress plainness the two had much in common in their painterly sensibilities and their determination to shock and challenge us, the success with which they entertain us at the same time with the passion and purity of their anger.
There is male nudity, homoeroticism, brutality and violence in this film. Be forewarned, this may not be your cup of tea. But for those whose cup it is, or who are willing to take a bit of a flutter, EDWARD II will reward them handsomely. It is not going to be easy to find; even in Seattle, it is only playing at the Broadway Market in the heart of the gay ghetto of Capital Hill. Pay whatever you must; it's worth it.
-- Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney
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