Queer Edward II

A chance discovery of buried celluloid treasure inspired Queer Edward II, which was born when first-time director Theo Rollason learned about an unseen archive of footage featuring pioneering British film-maker, visual artist and gay rights campaigner Derek Jarman at work. Rollason revisits that vintage material here and highlights its undercurrent of political protest, which feels particularly timely today, with hard-won LGBTQ equality under renewed threat from right-wing populist movements and authoritarian regimes.

World premiered to warm reviews in Venice earlier this week, with a London film festival slot to follow, Queer Edward II is scrappy and disjointed in places. That said, it gathers force into an intimate, humane, politically engaged film that partly plays like a time capsule of ancient history but sometimes feels like it could have been made yesterday. Jarman’s high-profile legacy and mischievous, mirthful, articulate on-screen presence should ensure heathy audience interest, aided by Rollason’s generally thoughtful framing choices.

In early 1991, Jarman gave young Irish cinematographer Seamus McGarvey free rein to document his film shoot for Edward II, a heavily stylised, proudly homoerotic update of Christopher Marlowe’s 16th century stage play about the eponymous English king and his scandalously close friendship with Piers Gaveston, which many of his contemporaries and later biographers believe was a gay love affair. Starring Steven Waddington, Andrew Tiernan and regular Jarman muse Tilda Swinton, the film was made at Bray Studios, on London’s western fringes. Partly funded with BBC money, it became Jarman’s biggest budget production, but it was still plagued by financial strains and backstage ructions.

McGarvey, who had worked with Jarman previously, amassed hours and hours of informal conversations and fly-on-the-wall reportage from the Edward II shoot. Soon afterwards, he began scoring credits for major directors including Joe Wright, Sam Taylor-Wood, Lynne Ramsay and Stephen Daldry, earning an Oscar nomination for Wright’s Atonement (2007). In the process, he seems to have largely forgotten about this shelved footage, which languished in limbo for more than 30 years before Rollason made a deal to salvage and repurpose it.

A nostalgic time-jump back to that relatively recent but somehow impossibly distant analogue age before mobile phones, the internet and social media, Queer Edward II exposes one of cinema’s key unspoken guilty secrets: that making movies is a dull, prosaic, glamour-free grind, especially when you are working on a skimpy budget. Rollason has heavily trimmed and shaped McGarvey’s raw footage into a loose narrative, of course, but he still cannot quite disguise the Groundhog Day loop of low-energy small talk, dreary technical tweaks and interminable hanging around that prevails on most film sets, even those with a legendary art-house auteur in charge.

Thankfully, much more engrossing than the procedural nuts and bolts of film-making is the angry political context behind Edward II. Jarman transformed this antique play into an explicit piece of neo-Brechtian avant-garde protest art against Britain’s conservative government, which was enacting draconian anti-gay legislation and shamelessly pandering to public panic around the ongoing AIDS crisis. The director himself was diagnosed HIV positive in December 1986, and made a point of discussing it openly, bravely battling the stigma around the disease. For extra background, Rollason augments McGarvey’s footage with news coverage and TV interviews from the period, a jarring reminder of an era when so much mainstream media discourse was openly homophobic.

The most grippingly dramatic scenes in Queer Edward II actually take place away from Jarman’s cameras. For one crucial section of the film, the director enlisted extras from the recently launched OutRage!, a direct-action campaign group for LGBTQ rights co-founded by Australian activist Peter Tatchell. One of the group’s most divisive tactics was “outing” closeted celebrities, and they saw a juicy target in the wholesome Christian singer Cliff Richard, who was rehearing for a gospel-rock tour in an adjacent studio.

It is worth noting here that Richard’s sexual orientation remains private, even today, but it has long been the subject of speculation. While he does not appear in Rollason’s film, McGarvey captures the chaotic scenes when protestors gatecrash his rehearsals, only be be pushed bask by angry studio staff. The incident creates an ugly media scandal, which leaves the film’s irate producers fearing a ruinous lawsuit. Given a stern dressing down on camera, the normally bullish Tatchell appears unusually sheepish. But Jarman himself is more ambiguous, quietly relishing the group’s righteous anger and punky rebellion. Anarchy in the UK.

Spoiler alert: nobody ends up getting sued and the shoot wraps up smoothly, climaxing in a musical cameo by Annie Lennox. Edward II went on to win wide acclaim and multiple prizes, including Best Actress for Swinton at the 1991 Venice film festival. Jarman would make two more features before his death from AIDS-related illness in 1994. Seeing him so joyously, defiantly alive is one of the core pleasures of Rollason’s bittersweet gem of a documentary, which is part celebration, part memorial and part cautionary history lesson.

Director, screenwriter: Theo Rollason
Cast: Derek Jarman, Tilda Swinton, Steven Waddington, Andrew Tiernan, Peter Tatchell, Annie Lennox
Cinematography: Seamus McGarvey
Editing: Nicole Hálová, Theo Rollason
Music: Simon Fisher Turner
Producers: Ahmad Ahmadzadeh, Ben Fowlie, Sebastien Rabas, Michael Sherman
Production companies: Lightborn Films (UK), Blue Moon Films (UK), Matter Out of Place (UK), March 13th (US), John Gore Studios (UK)
World sales: After Hours / Cinephil
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Venice Open, out of competition)
In English
97 minutes