Queen Elizabeth I (Jenny Runacre),guided by John Dee (Richard O'Brien) and spirit guide Ariel (David Brandon),travels forward in time to the eve of the Silver Jubilee to witness Britain in a state of moral and physical decay. The Queen is dead, and the streets are now seemingly ran by groups of punks wearing outlandish clothes and face-paint. One particular group, consisting of, amongst others, Amyl Nitrate (Jordan),Mad (Toyah Willcox),Bod (Runacre in a dual role),Crabs (Nell Campbell) and Chaos (Hermine Demoriane),tend to spend their time smashing cars, having sex, participating in the odd murder, and generally giving the two-finger salute to anything resembling conformity. Crabs picks up a young punk named Kid (Adam Ant),who has aspirations to be a rock star, and finds himself being swept up by the system.

Derek Jarman certainly wasn't a punk - he was at least one generation too late and his art was generally more focused on themes of homosexuality and homoerotica - but Jubilee seems to aspire to be a film that defines punk. As well as the many punk acts that appears in the film (Siouxsie and the Banshees, Wayne County and The Stilts all appear as well as the aforementioned Jordan, Wilcox and Adam Ant),Jubilee adopts a punk aesthetic. The Britain of the 'future' is a dystopian wasteland, filmed in the poorer areas of London that are still marked by the Blitz, visualised through a grey-blue tinted lens. The outfits are a ragged mixture of fashions and social decadence from years and centuries past, combined to make a mockery of social conformity and mass consumerism.

Yet the film is a lot more than a representation of a movement that caught the director's eye. Jarman combines themes of sci-fi, social commentary, the idea of 'Britishness', and satire, in what is ultimately a bit of a mess, but an intriguing and often fascinating mess nonetheless. In fact, this roughness works in favour of it's nihilistic outlook, and the episodic structure offers some bizarre and outlandish vignettes (my personal favourites being Jordan's rendition of Rule Britannia in an Union Jack dress and the murder of a transvestite). But the film wanders on for a bit too long, lessening its impact, and shifting focus to Kid's dull plight in the music business (although it does introduce the phenomenal Jack Birkett).

This is certainly Jarman like I've never seen him before, possibly the most complex and 'cinematic' of his filmography, but the film sometimes overreach itself. Often the film becomes confusing, shifting it's tone from dramatic to satirical, causing the message that Jarman is trying to communicate to blur to the point where I didn't know whether to laugh or to ponder. Is this a film celebrating punk and rebellion? Or is it satirising punk? I've read various writings about this film that claim both. As a film, it lacks lacks narrative and focus, but as an experience, it is certainly memorable. It also has a great cast of actors and musicians that are still remembered in cult circles from old Britain, including Ian Charleson, Karl Johnson, Claire Davenport and Lindsay Kemp, for those, like me, who enjoy looking back in time at Britain, which is ironically the opposite to what Queen Elizabeth I does in Jubilee.

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Queen Elizabeth I (Jenny Runacre, Son of Dracula, The Witches) asks her occultist John Dee (Richard O'Brien of Rocky Horror fame) - an advocate of British imperialism that spent the last thirty years of his life learning the secret language of angels - and Ariel from Shakespeare's The Tempest (David Brandon, Delirium, Stagefright) to show her the future.

That future? The no future of the punk rock era, a place where Queen Elizabeth II was killed in a mugging and a gang of punk rock survivors, including Amyl Nitrate (Jordan, the model who was of the creators of W10 London punk look),Bod (Runacre in a second role),Chaos (French singer, writer and tightrope walker Hermine Demoriane),Mad (singer Toyah Willcox) and Crabs (Little Nell from Rocky Horror, who even gets in the line "Don't dream it, be it."). When they're not talking about boys or music, they're talking about how history can be manipulated. And then Amyl Nitrite says that her heroine has always been Myra Hindley (Hindley and Ian Brady were responsible for the Moors Murders, which occurred in and around Manchester between mid-1963 and late-1965, claiming five child victims and inspiring the song "Suffer Little Children" by The Smiths).

Things making too much sense? There's also Borgia Ginz, who shares a house with Hitler, runs the world and has transformed Buckingham Palace into a recording studio and Westminster Cathedral into a disco where Jesus performs.

Beyond the nihilism and lack of hope in this film, there's also plenty of punk rock stars, like Adam Ant and Wayne County along for the ride and gamely performing songs, as well as blink and you miss it moments for Siouxie and the Banshees and the Slits. And hey - the music is by Ol' Sourpuss himself, Brian Eno.

Director Derek Jarman may have based this movie in punk rock, but he was against the scene's fascism fetish, as well as its love of stupidity and violence. Many punks weren't pleased with the film, such as fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, who created an open letter T-shirt that denounced the film because of how she felt it misrepresented punk.

Jubilee is definitely a time capsule of Thatcher-era England. It's loud, obnoxious and strange, which are all wonderful things to be

Clearly this is not a movie for just everybody. It's an artistic movie, without a real story in it and lots of odd moments and characters in it. However once you get into the movie and understand its 'world' you get somewhat taken by it, no matter how weird things get.

This is the sort of production you normally will only see in some obscure and small theater. It's also probably where it belongs, since it's not really the type of thing that translates itself well to the silver screen. The artistic approach to its world, characters and the acting and the whole idea behind this movie seems to be all more suitable for a theater production than a movie really.

But having said that, I obviously didn't hated watching this movie. I could really appreciate it for what it was and what it was trying to do and tell. It's a kind of pretest movie and social commentary, that seems to fit really well within its time period and captures its time period really well too. The movie has a rebellious flair to it and it's kicking against numerous things, which all made me remind this movie somewhat of "A Clockwork Orange" (which this movie also tries to impersonate, I believe),also with all of its characters, settings and dialog.

Surprisingly enough the movie also has some good musical numbers in it. After all, the movie is still a punk rock movie as well, which all also really adds to the movie its overall style of film-making and its atmosphere that goes along with it.

This movie is simply good enough for what it is, once you get into it.

6/10

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