Jarman's directorial choices are always a surprise, and sometimes strikingly so, even if he reduces the play to the level of "we don't like your boyfriend." His decision to have Annie Lennox serenade the departing Gaveston and his lover with a rendition of Cole Porter's "Every Time We Say Goodbye" is a brilliant stroke it's Marlowe meets MTV. They want the base Gaveston gone, one way or another.
The earls and barons, who are appalled by the power Edward has bestowed on Gaveston, are portrayed as corporate board members, bland bureaucrats in three-piece suits. They're young toughs, the classical equivalent of skinheads, who outrage the establishment with their lewd behavior and disrespect for authority. In his hands, "Edward II" has become a chic melodrama that's part art object, part "The Valley of the Dolls." The king (Steven Waddington) and Gaveston (Andrew Tiernan) parade around with their followers at their heels like a surly street gang spoiling for a fight. That doesn't mean that his departures aren't radical. Instead, he's found support for his themes within the text. Regardless of whether his view of the material matches up with history, Jarman hasn't tortured his source to fit his agenda. Jarman, the British director who suffers from AIDS and whose past work ("Caravaggio" and "Sebastiane," among others) has dealt openly with gay themes, has found in Edward a martyred hero, a victim of repression and injustice whose obsessional passion for another man, the despised Gaveston, leads to his overthrow and savage murder. Faithfulness to either period or text has been abandoned in favor of a politicized, revisionist version of the play's events in which Marlowe's buried subtext - in particular, the sexual proclivities of his principal characters - becomes the main text. In its settings (mostly bare walls and dirt floors) and its wardrobe (characters wear contemporary, mostly black fashions) and countless other anachronisms, the film presents an out-of-time, theatrical sense of history. "Edward II," Derek Jarman's phantasmagoric, outrageously stylized interpretation of the Christopher Marlowe play, is more a creature of its director's sensibility than its creator's.
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