|
"Party time! Liberate the zoo!" It begins where Buñuel's Simon of the Desert ends, time-traveling Elizabeth I (Jenny Runacre) contemplates the future shock of a noisy British apocalypse. The rubble is seen through the smoke of a torched pram, graffiti on the wall gives it a name, "post-modern." The anarchic historian (Jordan), the nymphomaniac (Little Nell) and the arsonist (Toyah Willcox) stomp in the void, the aspiring musician (Adam Ant) licks his own image on the telly. The tenous hope of the pansexual triangle (Ian Charleson, Karl Johnson, Linda Spurrier) is not long for this realm, thus "the blank generation," eagerly packaged by the cackling media overlord (Orlando) who runs his recording studio out of Buckingham Palace. "As long as the music's loud enough, we won't hear the world falling apart." Derek Jarman on punk like Tashlin on rock 'n' roll, a wrathful eruption inevitably absorbed by the capitalism it aims to skewer. Eurovision survives in the wasteland, the national entry is a warbling travesty of "Rule, Britannia" with droning bombs and echoing "Sieg Heils." A pirouette before the pyre, the crown stolen from the royal corpse. "Tough shit, you virgin queen." The seasoned gender-blur (Jayne County) gets throttled, auto demolition courtesy of The Slits adduces a note from Godard's Weekend. Plastic violets in the garden, Christ at the group grope, "love" carved and salted on shoulder blades. The archaic and the anarchic and the subversive and the sell-out, the last refuge locates a doddering Führer. "This vision exceedeth all expectation." Jarman closes with a remedy for cacophonous fads, a sonnet plus the endless ocean. With Richard O'Brien, Hermine Demoriane, Neil Kennedy, Lindsay Kemp, David Brandon, and Siouxsie and the Banshees.
--- Fernando F. Croce |