Derek Jarman (1978)

Queen Elizabeth I, with the help of her occultist adviser John Dee and through the agency of the spirit guide Ariel, time-travels with them both to visit the realm of her namesake as queen of England, in the year of the latter’s Silver Jubilee.  Elizabeth II is dead, however, a recent victim of the urban violence that’s rife in the London of 1977 that the writer-director Derek Jarman puts on screen in Jubilee.  The first Queen Elizabeth, as incarnated by Jenny Runacre, is more beautiful than you might expect yet she’s anxious and weary too.  Her lady-in-waiting (Helen Wellington-Lloyd), who accompanies her on the journey to the twentieth century, has a glumly fascinated air.  As John Dee, Richard O’Brien speaks deliberately but hypnotically.  Ariel (David Haughton), wearing a silver suit and entirely black eyeballs, is beauteously artificial in appearance as well as in voice.  The sixteenth-century Elizabethan introduction to Jubilee is altogether arresting but Derek Jarman loses no time in transporting the queen and her retinue into the dystopia of late 1970s London – the waste lands, the sexual permutations, the anomie and anarchy – which they observe rather than interact with.  The end of the film sees the quartet return to the first Elizabethan England.

Jubilee makes extensive use of punk aesthetics and the eclectic cast includes plenty of punk rock icons and/or performers but Jarman seems to have a larger interest in the dynamics between the sexes and between different sexual orientations.   The prime movers are young women:  Amyl Nitrate (Jordan), Mad (Toyah Willcox), Crabs (Nell Campbell), Chaos (Hermine Demoriane) and Bod (Jenny Runacre again).   Amyl Nitrate is an avowed admirer of Myra Hindley; Bod has killed Elizabeth II and appropriated her crown; but the female violence in the film – often avenging violence – is mostly directed at men or, in one case, a man dressed as a woman.  (This character, Lounge Lizard, is played by Wayne County, who went on to become, as Jayne County, rock’s first transgender singer.)   The male victims include two men who have casual sex with Crabs, whose relaxed promiscuity is disparaged by Mad and Bod in particular.  The first of these Victims is asphyxiated; the second is blown up by a homemade incendiary device.   He is one of a pair of Special Branch policemen, who have shot dead Angel (Ian Charleson) and Sphinx (Karl Johnson), incestuous brothers who inhabit the same squat as the five main women.  (The other Special Branch man has acid thrown in his face before being castrated by the women.)  The gay Angel and the bisexual Sphinx are unaggressive and (therefore) likeable males – the same goes for the young punk rocker Kid (Adam Ant).  The other key male character is the lavishly camp impresario Borgia Ginz (Orlando) with whom the female principals eventually sign a recording contract.

This is another film I didn’t see when it first appeared and which it’s now just about impossible to see for what it started as.  In retrospect, Jubilee is affecting in various ways:  it seems both politically naive and prophetic.  The aggressive, cauterising energy of the female characters in the poxy, rundown London envisaged by Derek Jarman is a bizarre anticipation of the coming to power of Margaret Thatcher little more than a year after Jubilee was released (so are the pearls worn by Amyl Nitrate).  Yet the film doesn’t foresee Thatcherism in a substantial or considered way and it certainly can’t predict another scourge of the coming years:  AIDS claimed the lives of Jarman, in 1994, and, four years earlier, Ian Charleson, the most gifted member of the Jubilee cast.  Sphinx, an artist called Viv (Linda Spurrier) and Angel lie in bed together – Angel is slightly separated from the other two, whose bodies touch, and sings ‘My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose’.   Charleson’s singing – he had a beautiful voice – expresses love and lust.  The moment is very poignant.

Although he has to work quite hard to sustain his Cockney accent, Charleson, with his combination of authority and delicacy, is a remarkable presence in Jubilee.  The odd variety of players and performing styles works well, for the most part.   Jordan’s primitive acting as Amyl Nitrate is more effective than Toyah Willcox’s more conscious insistency as the pyromaniac Mad.  (And Jordan’s ‘Rule Britannia’ number is one of the musical highlights.)  I don’t think it was simply hindsight that made me feel that Willcox conventionalises the spirit of punk.  (Perhaps that’s what Jarman wanted:  it fits with the punk girls’ eventual surrender to the capitalist Borgia Ginz but Mad’s surrender, because of the way Willcox plays her, has relatively little impact.)  Karl Johnson gives Sphinx an ordinary reality that’s very distinctive in this rampantly eccentric world.

The BFI screening of Jubilee was preceded by Punk Can Take It (1979), a short directed by Julien Temple.  It’s done in the form of a parody World War II documentary, with punks presented as heroic English patriots, resisting the attempts to do them down of establishment enemy factions.   After recently suffering (as much as I could take of) Temple’s Absolute Beginners, I wasn’t hopeful but Punk Can Take It is amusing, particularly the spoof narration, which is read by the veteran BBC broadcaster John Snagge.  According to a good but anonymous summary on IMDB, this was ‘a theatrically released promo for the UK Subs’ and clips of the Subs in concert are the pulse of the piece – although I found them rather upstaged by the other newsreel footage and the staged war comedy sketches that Temple has put together.

29 September 2015