The Angelic Conversation
First screened and reviewed in August 2025
Director: Derek Jarman. Cast: Paul Reynolds, Phillip Williamson, Judi Dench, Dave Baby, Timothy Burke, Simon Costin, Christopher Hobbs, Philip McDonald, Toby Mott, Steve Randall, Robert Sharp, Tony Wood. Screenplay: William Shakespeare (!!). In Brief:
Dench's sonnet recitals are beautiful but not dramatic. Jarman's enigmatic images are both. Enough for me!
VOR:③
Jarman would soon hone his approach to abstract collage to a finer edge, but this is a valuable historical tribute and a twist on Shakespearean film.
I chose a decades-postponed first viewing of The Angelic Conversation to commemorate the last official night of my three-year term as chair of my university's Gender & Sexuality Studies program. Derek Jarman's very gay elegy for longing and loss in the early years of AIDS, accompanied by Judi Dench's voiceover recitations of 14 Shakespearean sonnets, remains a very moving and poetic document four decades on. I'm not sure Dench's readings and Jarman's visions always coalesce as resonantly as they might, even if we grant the filmmaker's pointed stress on brokenness and separation; certainly the last thing he wants is for these nondialogic scenes to "illustrate" what the sonnets describe or proclaim. It's also worth remembering that the queer love forthrightly expressed in several of the poems was not as acknowledged in 80s-era Shakespeare scholarship as it has since become, which makes The Angelic Conversation at least as bold a reframing of the Bard and his work as Jarman's avant-garde, sepulchral, raining-inside-the-mansion film of The Tempest six years earlier, with its memorably and unexpectedly bright finish.
Even richer dialogues would soon follow between Jarman and major figures of Western culture (Caravaggio, Owen, Marlowe, Wittgenstein), as would higher peaks in this mode of abstract, loosely allegorical, 8mm assemblage, of which 1987's The Last of England feels like the clear pinnacle. As implied there, it's possible that anger fueled Jarman to even greater, bolder art than grief or desire, though few filmmakers synthesized all three as fully and potently as he did. The Angelic Conversation could do with a bit more spitfire and a wider range of variation; at only 77 minutes, it still feels a bit long. But neither the mourning the film conveys nor its delectation in lovers' bodies are ever furnished here outside a political context, as clear and sharp as a razor. Dench's voice isn't operating from that place of rage and sorrow, but Jarman's images are, and it's almost too painful to wonder how many of the young, unblemished, neoclassically proportioned wrestlers, swimmers, paramours, and wanderers were still alive when the film was released in the UK (but not the US) in 1985, or if any are still alive now. Grade:B
(I originally wrote this review on Letterboxd, where you can also comment if you like.)
