THE GARDEN

Half waking dream and half fiery polemic, THE GARDEN was born of director Derek Jarman’s rage over continued anti-gay discrimination and the sluggardly response to the AIDS crisis—he had been diagnosed HIV positive in 1988. Starring Tilda Swinton, this uniquely kaleidoscopic film shows the filmmaker’s genius at its most coruscating, making space in its breadth of vision for an over-the-top Hollywood-style musical number, nightmare images of tar-and-feather queer persecution, and footage of the particularly menacing-looking nuclear power plant that overlooks Jarman’s own garden, the point from which his film begins, and a cherished spot which he must keep to tending even as his body begins to betray him. Writhing with sorrow and anger, and yet so vividly alive to the loveliness of being, THE GARDEN is a baleful and beautiful epistle from the brink of the beyond.

Since his death, Jarman has become a tourist destination in addition to an artist. Pilgrims flock to his garden at Dungeness. THE GARDEN, however, isn’t after your devotion or its associated tokens; its ambitions are grander and less attainable than sainthood. As Jarman writes in Modern Nature, “Strands of thought crisscross, but one thing is clear: the film must show the quaint illusion of narrative cinema threadbare.” Elsewhere: “Had I not raised a hopeless banner against the admen of the Cinema Renaissance, entered a battle I knew I would never win—not even posthumously as they held all the cards?” The banner still flies. Death is not the end. It’s an opportunity.