There could hardly be a more vivid time-capsule film about the publicly funded British arts scene in the early 1990s than this engrossing fly-on-the-wall documentary about Derek Jarman and his movie Edward II. Based on the play by Christopher Marlowe, it is about the 14th-century English king and his love affair with his court favourite, Piers Gaveston, with Steven Waddington and Andrew Tiernan as the leads and Tilda Swinton as Queen Isabella.
This film uses the tremendously funny and candid making-of footage shot at the time by Seamus McGarvey, who had worked as a camera assistant on earlier Jarman films War Requiem and The Garden, and whose distinguished career as a cinematographer lay ahead. Jarman emerges as an effortless leader with a beaming patrician authority, rather like David Lean or Richard Attenborough, the kind of chief whom subordinates instinctively wish to please while keeping from him the grubby problems that they themselves have to deal with, such as paying quarrelsome extras or handling tabloid press questions. Jarman had had his HIV diagnosis for five years at this stage, managing the situation with meds which McGarvey’s camera notices.
