The Garden
Derek Jarman, GB 1990; Screenplay: Derek Jarman; Cinematography: Christopher Hughes; Editing: Peter Cartwright; Music: Simon Fisher Turner; Cast: Tilda Swinton, Johnny Mills, Kevin Collins, Pete Lee-Wilson, Spencer Leigh. DCP (from Super 8, 16mm and Video), color, 85 min. EnglishDream sequences and hallucinatory passages recur across Jarman's oeuvre, but here – in this audaciously loose retelling of Christ's crucifixion via the persecutions suffered by a contemporary gay couple – the oneiric finally takes center stage. The opening shows the filmmaker asleep at his desk, before we plunge into his symbolic reveries. Drawing on religious iconography in ways designed to shock the puritanical forces still very much present in British society toward the end of the 20th century, Jarman presents a blazing retort to the Conservative government's homophobic Section 28 legislation. A dazzling collage of scenes and impressions in which Tilda Swinton gets to play the Virgin Mary and where conventional dialogue and plot development are rendered almost entirely superfluous, it sees Jarman grappling with his own recently diagnosed HIV‑positive status for the first time on film. (N.Y.)