Derek Jarman's best film since The Last of England, this is a trenchant but unecessarily flawed sort-of-modern-dress adaptation of Marlowe's play, splendidly heavy with atmosphere, but with the homosexual content expanded and embellished: that's a shame because this richly-textured film has merit, and Jarman for sure has talent, which he should offer to a wider audience. Here, all the periphery (that is, stuff not in the play) is blatantly gay: naked men making love to each other behind the actors, or provocative modern gay and lesbian banners protesting against discrimination. Subtlety is not the order of the day in this treatment, in contrast to the performances, all pretty good, and especially those by Steven Waddington (king), Tilda Swinton (queen) and Nigel Terry (Mortimer), though the latter is forced to play a scene in bed reading a book called Unholy Babylon, with a picture of Saddam Hussein on the cover, a gag more appropriate to a Carry On film. It would be nice, though, if Jarman could show us what he could do with a good story, whose sexual elements, gay or straight, were entirely relevant to the plot.


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