THE GARDEN

The Garden is Derek Jarman's most personal work so far, touching on the Aids crisis and the issue of his own mortality. The early part of the film is dominated by the windswept landscape of the Kent coast, elemental images, which are intercut with scenes of Jarman building a garden at his home in the shadow of the Dungeness nuclear power station. Slowly a narrative emerges in a series of dreamscapes and tableaux representing familiar Christian moments, as the garden becomes both Gethsemane and Eden. In this fragmented exploration of the Passion, the figure of Christ is intermittently replaced by two young men, lovers who are arrested, persecuted, humiliated and tortured. As the film unfolds, New Testament events (with the luminous Tilda Swinton as Madonna) are set against the background of contemporary Britain, examining the persecution of homosexuality through the centuries and interrogating the role of the church in the Aids crisis. The Garden is an aural and visual tour-de-force, a kaleidoscopic series of stunning and surprising images - disturbing, funny, beautiful.
(Kay Armatage, 1990)