Blue
is an arresting quasi-movie with one or two jaw-dropping moments. Its
radical experiment with style – the absence of all visuals, in favour
of an unchanging electric blue screen – makes it more suitable for the
art gallery than the cinema and ultimately this makes it a less than
stellar movie. It gets a bit like staring into a talking, musical
electronic mosquito zapper and is fairly impossible to sit through, but
letting it play on the VCR while you do other things around the house
is the way to go: the film’s incredible soundscape makes a great
backdrop and at least half a dozen times you’ll be hooked by a
shattering line of dialogue, or a cuttingly intelligent observation and
you’ll stop, listen and reflect.
Derek Jarman made this film through the blindness of cytomegalovirus
retinitis, in the last year of his life. There is no break in the
vision in the film: the blue screen starts after the opening credits,
and finishes a split second before the closing credits. We see things
through Jarman’s extinguished eyes, and hear his semi-mad thoughts.
Hypnotic or boring? Some have called Blue
a great masterpiece, but in my opinion it fails as a film because it
just doesn’t have the basic elements that make films work. Like a car
without any wheels, Blue is fascinating and odd,
but kind of broken.
Where it does work is in the way it captures Jarman’s raw penultimate
thoughts and emotions, his reflections on life, society, science and
AIDS as he’s sucked into the abyss. Some of the statements in Blue
are utterly incredible, like:
It
started with sweats in the night and swollen glands. Then the black
cancer spread across their faces - as they fought for breath TB and
pneumonia hammered their lungs, and Toxo at the brain. Reflexes
scrambled - sweat poured through hair matter like lianas in the
tropical forest. Voices slurred - and then were lost forever.
Or:
I
shall not win the battle against the virus - in spite of the slogans
like "Living with AIDS". The virus was appropriated by the well - so we
have to live with AIDS while they spread the quilt for the moths of
Ithaca across the wine dark sea.
Or:
In
the hospital it is as quiet as a tomb. The nurse fights to find a vein
in my right arm. We give up after five attempts. Would you faint if
someone stuck a needle into your arm? I've got used to it - but I still
shut my eye.
Few films – few anythings – catch this
level of AIDS-horrror so effectively, and none do it with such poetic
grace. Jarman, Tilda Swinton and others give Jarman’s words
extraordinary flight. The power and value of Blue
is not in question. It just isn’t really a movie as such, and despite
the novelty of a film maker robbed of his sight giving us a movie with
no visuals, the film is more poem than movie, and makes for a bit of an
endurance test with occasional
treats.
Related
Reading: If you would like to read the full text of Blue,
you can do so here.
