The Angelic Conversation is a lyrical, haunting film about a young man’s search for love in a dreamlike landscape. Its tone is set by the juxtaposition of slow moving homo-erotic images and opaque landscapes through which two men take a journey into their own desires. Offscreen, Dame Judi Dench recites a sequence of Shakespeare's sonnets that counterpoint the action. Jarman called it, “My most austere work, but also the closest to my heart.”
Judi Dench
(voice)
Paul Reynolds
Philip Williamson
Dave Baby
Timothy Burke
Simon Costin
Christopher Hobbs
Philip MacDonald
Toby Mott
The Angelic Conversation is a lyrical, haunting film about a young man’s search for love in a dreamlike landscape. Its tone is set by the juxtaposition of slow moving homo-erotic images and opaque landscapes through which two men take a journey into their own desires. Offscreen, Dame Judi Dench recites a sequence of Shakespeare's sonnets that counterpoint the action. Jarman called it, “My most austere work, but also the closest to my heart.”
Paul Reynolds and Philip Williamson reminded me of silent film actors in this really quite poignant tale of homosexual longing, lust and pure love all complemented by a Shakesperian narrative consisting of fourteen of his sonnets read, emotively and vibrantly, by Judi Dench. The imagery is often quite disjointed and abstract: inanimate objects frequently imbued with animate traits - all as one man seeks his love, and also an assurance that he is pure enough to deserve and keep it. It lacks pace. At times this is more of a collage of loosely related scenes rather than a continuing storyline and it is certainly self-indulgent - not a criticism that could be laid unfairly at most Derek Jarman works, I find. That said, it is never boring. It won't be for everyone, indeed I'm not really sure it was for me - but it is more than cinematic wallpaper, and may well resonate more with those from the gay community of mid 1980s Thatcherite Britain than perhaps with many others. It is interesting, but I doubt I would watch it again
An odyssey through time and memory, centered on a place in New Jersey where—from wilderness, and then, later, from a home—love, loss, struggle, hope and legacy play out between couples and families over generations.
England, 1600. Queen Elizabeth I promises Orlando, a young nobleman obsessed with poetry, that she will grant him land and fortune if he agrees to satisfy a very particular request.
94-year-old Eleanor Morgenstein tries to rebuild her life after the death of her best friend. As a result, she moves back to New York City after living in Florida for decades.
Feeling awkward and isolated, an imaginative and strong-willed teenage girl runs away from home with an older punk rock drifter.
Sophie reflects on the shared joy and private melancholy of a holiday she took with her father twenty years earlier. Memories fill the gaps between camcorder footages as she tries to reconcile the father she knew with the troubled man she didn't.
Beth, a bookish teenager, befriends Emilia, an aspiring novelist who has just arrived in town. Emilia soon begins an affair with Beth's father that threatens to have devastating consequences.
Football star Charlie has the world at her feet. With a top club desperate to sign her, her future is seemingly mapped out. But the teenager sees only a nightmare. Raised as a boy, Charlie is torn between wanting to live up to her father's expectations and shedding this ill fitting skin.
A young woman lives a life filled with bad choices. At a young age she marries and has a child--with an abusive thief who quickly ends up in prison. Left alone, she takes up with the guy's mate, another thief, who seems to give her some happiness but who also ends up locked up. She then takes up with a series of seedy types who offer nothing but momentary pleasure--if that.
A mismatched couple's marital problems come to the surface when the husband develops an interest in their pretty boarder.
A disillusioned, angry university graduate comes to terms with his grudge against middle-class life and values.