BLUE Movie Review

“I'm not afraid of death but I am afraid of dying,” wrote filmmaker Derek Jarman in 1992. “Pain can be alleviated by morphine but the pain of social ostracism cannot be taken away.” In 1993, only months before his death from AIDS, Jarman completed his final film, a contemplation of his life and impending death featuring a dense, carefully orchestrated soundtrack of voices, sound effects, and music, but containing only a single visual image. Yet such a description is misleading, for the lone image—a deep, unchanging, solid blue light projected onto the screen of the darkened theatre—is the canvas on which we see the pictures that Jarman forces us to conjure. Since we do the conjuring, the images we see—and we do see them—are private visual communications between Jarman and the viewer, allowing us the freedom to visualize our own lives, our own decay and our own deaths with an hallucinatory intensity that is at once shocking, surprising, and liberating. This is a great film as well as a brilliant stunt, perhaps the only successful example in movie history of a filmmaker preparing a last will and testament for himself that inspires awe, tears, and joy in people who never knew him. Blue takes us directly to the specifics of the disease's effects on Jarman's body, and then, in what seems like an instant, stares intense suffering in the eye and molds it—as if pain were being used as a material for origami—into a creative grace that shames each of us into an overwhelming gratitude for being able to feel at all. With a score by Simon Fisher Turner, and a cast that includes Jarman, John Quentin, Nigel Terry, and Tilda Swinton.

NEXT STOP … Ikiru, Parting Glances, Near Death

1993 (R) 76m/C GB D: Derek Jarman; W: Derek Jarman; M: Simon Fisher Turner. VHS KIV