★ 6 / 10
The rights of kings may well have been
CinemaSerf
The rights of kings may well have been divine in the fourteenth century, but that was only so long as you could carry the support of the church, your wife and…
The rights of kings may well have been divine in the fourteenth century, but that was only so long as you could carry the support of the church, your wife and the powerful nobles upon whom this whole game of political jenga was based. When Edward II (Steven Waddington) decides to tempt just about all of these pillars of support by openly parading his lover Gaveston (Andrew Tiernan) to his court, it seems to manage something that had hitherto be rare in his kingdom. It galvanised just about everyone into a position where the proper order had to be restored and the boyfriend sent into exile. Initially, the king tries to assert his authority and even reduces an archbishop (Dudley Sutton) to degradation, but with his wife (Tilda Swinton) and her powerful lover Mortimer (Nigel Terry) increasingly aware that the crown can be their’s with little risk of protest from anyone, things become distinctly perilous for the king and any who support him. Derek Jarman has heavily abridged Christopher Marlowe’s speculative play, and by mixing the aesthetics of the twentieth century with more contemporary ones, and by the very creative use of a soundtrack, he creates a visually stylised account of the ultimate in treason that I admit, I struggled to appreciate. I do recall seeing this first time around and being frankly rather bored. Thirty-odd years later I can probably appreciate the artistry rather better and my brain is better wired for the intensity of the dialogue, but it’s still a remarkably sterile interpretation of a story of treachery, brutality and lust. Sure, there’s nudity and simulated sex, but the rapport between Waddington and Tiernan was often akin to that of silent film actors working within the confines of some theatrical wings. The hybrid of production styles only really served to leave it dangling between two stools and the storytelling itself is sacrificed to the artifice too frequently, leaving us with a very skeletal take of this turbulent time in English history. Annie Lennox singing Cole Porter whilst the two, pyjama-clad, men have a dance is an intimate highlight but I’m afraid the rest is just too superficial.
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★ 7 / 10
a soulful transposition to exclaim Jarman's cri de coeur
lasttimeisaw
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…
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.
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