The Garden

An (in my opinion) uneasy combination of Jarman's more avant-garde and camp tendencies. A lot of the material has a similar feel to The Last of England, except here there's often a thudding literalness to the symbolism (AIDS as crucifixion metaphor) that detract from the images' more innate and impressionistic poetic force, and inversely the more garish and silly bits just feel out-of-place. Too often it unfortunately verges on self-parody of pretentious art films. Jarman is really hit-or-miss.