Jarman's Tempest

I watched this last night because The Tempest is one of my favorite Shakespeare plays and there are surprisingly few filmed versions (and the 2010 Taymor one stinks).

It feels sort of off-putting at the beginning. a lot of the dialogue is whispered or muttered, lots of scenes of people stalking around dark, dimly lit rooms. But it gets better as it goes along.

Jack Birkett as Caliban is really tremendous, a hulking, bald, blind man with a deep gentleness. And Ariel and Prospero and Miranda are all good too. Played by various members of Jarman’s groovy 70s queer entourage they're very young and beautiful and have good faces to look at. It all has this cool decadent 18th century aesthetic. And then it climaxes with this scene which is unbelievably beautiful and moved me to tears.

Then it jump cuts to the evening and everyone is gone and Prospero does the "our revels now are ended" speech and the movie ends.

And it made me feel such a powerful feeling of love and acceptance. Very It's All Going to Be Okay. The closest thing i can really compare it to is certain David Lynch movies. where it's all bright and campy with a sense of decay or aging beneath it. But it recasts that decay not as something bad or scary but as something strange and beautiful. None of us know why we're here or why we age and die or why we're conscious of it. But we can take joy in the fact that we are here and have managed to produce things like Shakespeare plays, weddings, golden costumes, jazz standards and so forth.

The tragedies are great but Shakespeare's comedies or problem plays get me like no other. particularly this and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. When there's a big marriage or celebration and then in the hangover of the big party one character address the audience and says basically “hey, isn't that life… a long, weird dream” (Prospero's "we are such stuff as dreams are made on" and Puck's "if we shadows have offended"). And for a long time i couldn't pinpoint why i found those so unspeakably beautiful and i still can't really. but i think i was thinking of it in terms of escapism, where you go to the theatre and you get to be in another, better world for a while before you have to return to work and taxes and making dinner. And that's not really right because you don't leave that world in the theatre, you carry it with you. the way you carry dreams with you when you wake up.