This engrossing if only erratically entertaining Derek Jarman film, told largely in subliminal flashes with a few grainy colour narrative sequences, is a paean of despair for an England devastated by some nameless disaster. Most audiences won't know what to make of it, and even Jarman aficionados are fooling themselves if they pretend to understand it all. The `flashes' are too repetitive to grip the interest all the time, and only towards the end does the film find some of the poetry it seems to seek. The poetry of the gutter? Perhaps. But here the film is at its most challenging. Its more hopeful images seem echoes from other fantasies that equally flitted back and forth across the thin line between failure and success.


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