Te-di-ous. Experimentation for the sake of experimentation. Derek Jarman supposedly tries to take us on a visually poetic journey accompanied by the poems of William Shakespeare, but the result is just a mess of repetitive, unbearable, and near to meaningless images either not linked at all or too simply connected to some of the minor pieces (for a reason) from “England’s national poet”.

When you take an experimental approach to when you film things those should be honestly connected to the will of conveying a certain meaning and story that cannot be expressed in any other way. Unfortunately, although most probably Jarman believed to do so and for him those probably have a clear explanation, for the external viewers those images just seem like a string of rather unconnected and unclear metaphors that just leave you cold and asking yourself not “what does that mean?” but “what is that?”.

Concurrently, those images are presented through wide variety of strange colour tonalities and totally intentional screwed up frame rate that instead of allowing a better or at least more engaged dialogue with the viewer it simply makes it even more unintelligible, hurting in the end the purpose and nature of storytelling and the rapport between storyteller and audience.

This seeming chaos is sometimes even perceived through the acting of the performers: weird looks, unintended smiles… Elements that show that not even those took part in creating the piece were fully convinced of what they were doing. Damaging already even more a film, that considering its intended rule-breaking, should at least make sure that everyone involved was fully invested in it.

The sole sequence that perceivably manages to break the screen barrier and punch some degree of emotion into the viewer is the long kissing sequence. Sadly, the trip that you have to go through until you reach that point simply feels pointless, and what comes after it suffers exactly from the same issue. The before and after to that scene just appears to be an unsuccessful excuse to reach that high moment and to create some kind of thread to tightly bookend the story with a fancy ribbon from side to side.

Last but not least, all this pandemonium goes along an intermittent appearance of Shakespeare poems narrated by Judi Dench, which initially grab your attention but once you start to go mad throughout the movie, you simply even stop paying attention to those.

All that said, look, if you really are into highly experimental and supposedly metaphorical stuff, sure… give it a try… why not? Maybe it is your thing. But, truth be told, as it has already been mentioned in the beginning, this is an experiment that most probably will end up blowing up in your face and leaving you completely baffled of what you have just witnessed.