Focus on DEREK JARMAN: The Last of England (1998)

It is difficult to encapsulate Derek Jarman's The Last of England more succinctly than the sustained, soul curdling scream that closes the film. Tilda Swinton, who pulls top billing on the film's home media covers nowadays despite her appearance being being both late and brief, owns the film as the lamenting bride that takes the film to its bristling climax.

I don't know if it is possible to muster up that much anger outside of Thatcher's Britain. Then, I don't know if it is possible to tap into Jarman's argument here either. The Last of England, like the poetry that it envelops and the video art it expands upon, is to a large degree cryptic. Its beauty, and its meaning, is in the eye of the beholder. Which isn't to say Jarman didn't provide clues (his memoir 'Kicking the Pricks', which was released as a companion work, points unambiguously to the director's unpacking of his childhood in Middlesex) but the overall effect is still, by necessity, disorienting.

Film scholars not that The Last of England ushers in Jarman's semi-narrative phase, though it is difficult to discern much narrative at all - the focus here is on the "semi". Perhaps "thematic" would be a more suitable moniker (I know I overuse the term) but even then Jarman is oblique. There would appear to be a neo-Hardy-esque lament for the loss of England's pre-industrial heyday but Jarman's imagery doesn't place his Paradise Lost with any precision. Does he mourn for pre-WWI's social order? There's a montage of industrial complex destruction that would seem to suggest as much. The complacent play in front yards would also suggest a general return to carefree infancy is attractive.

This mindset is particularly fronted in Jarman's treatment of war, no doubt owing to his father's lingering depression. Jarman's imagery confronts with anarchistic "tear down" vigour. The scorching tract depicting the "love" scene between the naked man and the riot policeman atop the Union Jack, is provocative art-protest of the rarest order. In its damning stance on conflict at home and abroad, generally and as it directly relates to Thatcher, The Last of England finds some shape. The war-mongering montage that bleeds into Swinton's marital denouement is one of the film's most impressive passages and is stocked with scornful Falkland era sound bytes.

And yet, Jarman's stance somehow presents as naive. He gives little consideration given to the British Empire's "traditional" colonialist mindset from which the Falklands sprang or, if we extend this out, to the general subjugation of Britons under the ruling classes that preceded Iron Tits. In this, Jarman's film feels like a mourning not so much for what has been lost but for some sort of hollow innocence.

I can't say it is not well directed anger, or a well-directed film, at that. But it is anger too personal to infect (at least from this decontextualised distance) and too obtuse to inspire.

Or, perhaps, I just need to read that companion piece.

Next up: War Requiem.

This post contributes to Director Focus: Derek Jarman.