War Requiem

WAR REQUIEM   ***1/2

Derek Jarman

1989

IDEA:  A visual interpretation of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem set to his compositions, in which an aged veteran reminisces about his experiences in World War I.

BLURB:  Few filmmakers could craft a lament as simultaneously furious, heartrending, and lyrical as Derek Jarman, and War Requiem is one of his best. Using Benjamin Britten’s opus of the same name as his foundation, the director sinuously weaves together war imagery, Christian iconography, and Tilda Swinton at her most mesmeric in a sequence of pure audiovisual poetry. Less blisteringly paced but just as shrewdly edited as Jarman’s previous apocalyptic jeremiad, The Last of England, the film takes us through a progression of tableaux by turns austere, ravishing, and mortally devastating. Cinematographer Richard Greatrex produces tactile images of soggy, pewter-colored trenches, curling smoke, and the skin of soldiers caked in mud; scored to plangent choirs, strings, and organs, these impressions of World War I agony are as potent as any passage in All Quiet on the Western Front or 1917. Jarman’s War Requiem goes further; incorporating found footage from a host of other international conflicts, some contemporaneous, and alluding to the AIDS crisis, it turns into a cri de coeur for the state of the modern world at large. At times, hellish montage gives way to protracted shots of otherworldly stillness, such as the remarkable one in which Swinton’s war nurse braids her hair and vacillates uneasily between willful ecstasy and insuppressible grief. These moments are Jarman’s War Requiem at its most sensuously empathic, forsaking the didactic for a language that speaks directly to the body and soul.