Edward II

King Edward is imprisoned. He remembers the events that led to his downfall: the young, newly crowned king ties his lover, Piers Gaveston, to his side by making him royal head of the nobility and the church. The queen, Isabella, is jealous and feels she has been publicly humiliated. Together with Roger Mortimer, who is one of the noblemen enraged by the king's actions, she tries to get Gaveston exiled. Hate, revenge, civil war and brutal murders make up the framework of Jarman's screen version of Christopher Marlowe's play from 1593.

Comment:
Derek Jarman - the ''enfant terrible'' of British film and the praiser of homoerotic love. The most well-known film by Jarman is perhaps Caravaggio (1986). The Baroque painter of that name broke with the artistic convention of his time, not least by using thiefs and prostitutes as models for his portraits of for example St. Mary Magdalen and St. John the Baptist. In the film these pictures, that are already in themselves charged, meet Jarman's openly homoerotic world of images and the result is a bland which equals nothing in beauty.
Jarman's latest film, Edward II, based on Marlowe's play of the same title, also turns out to be a vision of a mythical Renaissance world and a glorification of sexual transgression. Marlowe, who was a homosexual and a contemporary of Shakespeare, also wrote Dr. Faustus on which Goethe later based his drama.
In addition Marlowe's violently bloody and at the time very popular play about King Edward and the intrigues at the 14th century English court, has an openly homosexual theme: the relationship between the king and Piers Gaveston, a man of the people. Their relationship is the cause of the revolt against the king by the church, the nobility and the army.
Out of this Jarman has created a highly stylized virtual world., where quivering water surfaces, rough walls and cavelike rooms throw the story into a sort of a timeless and ''jointless'' semi-darkness. At the same time the film is a furious sexual-political contemporary drama, directed by against the antiquated homosex-laws of Britain. The remarkable thing is that Jarman remains faithful to Marlowe's language. Here trained actors speak a magnificent Old English. And yet Jarman manages to charge it with contemporary hidden meanings.
Maarit Koskinen