Wearing his gay-right crusading heart on his sleeve, Derek Jarman’s antepenultimate work EDWARD II is a post-modern interpretation of Christopher Marlowe’s play about the eponymous Plantagenet sovereign (Waddington, a celluloid debutant), whose partiality towards his male lover Piers Gaveston (newcomer Tiernan), raises Cain in the court and prompts his wife Queen Isabella (Swinton), in league with Lord Mortimer (Terry), to usurp his throne.
Shot in Jarman’s characteristic sparse, claustrophobic setting which avails itself of minimal indoor lighting and cherry-picked iconography to great effect (striking use of refraction, a quasi-black-box theater intimacy, etc.), EDWARD II radically strews anachronistic items into its theatrical foreground: a slick modern dance, characters sporting contemporary costumes and its trimmings (business suits for the members of the court and for Queen Isabella, a Hermes bag accompanies her entrance), brandishing modern weapons, notably a band of rioting gay right activists constitutes the king’s army, Jarman has economically, but also impressively warps its source play’s temporality and gives its story an exigency and immediacy that elicits strong topicality, when cruelty is wantonly lashed out at the beleaguered gay lovers.
Among the cast, every single one of the main cast robustly sinks his or her teeth into Marlowe’s florid wording, a savage-looking Tiernan flouts the traditional aesthetics of a rakish lotus eater and brings about a fierce ugliness that contests for a basic human right which goes beyond its often beautified physicality and narcissism (a self-seeking whippersnapper still has his inviolable right to love someone of his own sex); both Swinton and Terry grandly chew the scenery of lofty operatics, but in a commendable way which resoundingly adds the dramatic tension and heft of their sinister collusion, and by comparison Waddington, looks unfavorably bland and wishy-washy in a role who pluckily hazards his monarchial reign in favor of one single mortal that he holds dearest.
As Annie Lennox’s belts out “EV’RY TIME WE SAY GOODBYE” in her cameo appearance, Jarman’s EDWARD II is a soulful transposition to exclaim his cri de coeur, and steeped in his sui generis idiom that sublimes a tenacious beauty out of its rough-hewn components, but with a proviso that an acquired taste is requisite.
referential entries: Jarman’s CARAVAGGIO (1986, 7.5/10); SEBASTIANE (1976, 4.4/10).
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