An unseen woman recites 14 Shakespearean sonnets as a man silently seeks his heart's desire. The photography is stop-motion, the music is ethereal, and the scenery is often elemental with boulders and smaller rocks, the sea, smoke or fog, and a garden. The man is on an odyssey following his love. But he must first, as the sonnet says, know what conscience is. Before he can be united with his love, he must purify himself. He does so, bathing a tattooed figure and humbling himself in front of this being. He also prepares himself with water and through his journey and his meditations. Finally, he is united with his fair friend. This experimental film at first appears to be the internal fantasy of one man. In reality, the story is about the love between two gay men (acted by Paul Reynolds and Philip Williamson), seen against a backdrop of bleak industrial cityscapes or abstract landscapes. The sound of a ticking clock, and the voiceover of Shakespearean sonnets add poignancy and a sense of the brevity of life to the relationship of the two men.
If your idea of a good time is watching a bunch of men dressed in bed sheets dragging logs through a stream in slow motion, while listening to Dame Judi Dench intone Shakespeare's sonnets, you're in for a treat. Alternately, several segments take place in a cave, wherein several young men seem to be annointing another young man sitting on a throne. The symbolism is implicitly homoerotic, as is the entire subject matter of the film. Most of Shakespeare's sonnets are presumed to have been written to his young lover, Harry Wriothsley, Duke of Southampton.
"The Angelic Conversation" is an arthouse drama with its tone set by the juxtaposition of slow moving photographic images and Shakespeare's sonnets. The film consists primarily of images of homosexuality and opaque landscapes through which two men take a journey into their own desires. Furthermore, the image of two men wrestling, groping and kissing will confuse many viewers since they do not understand that these images are symbols of the attainment of True Self-Knowledge, the Twins Conjoined. They won't understand the eerie symbolism of the preparatory anointment of the tattooed man which refers to the preparation of the body for the Enthronement of the Realized Self. They won't cry in recognition of the Rising Sun on a male figure because they have not done the "wet work." And they will fail to understand the seabathing sequence as a metaphor for Baptism.
This is not a movie for the masses. But those prepared to view it will be overwhelmed by the harmony and balance of the film elements and will be deeply moved. There is a market for this kind of film, for those who are fed up with the decline in culture and education, with the stupefaction that ordinary movies provide. Director Derek Jarman described the film as: "A dream world, a world of magic and ritual, yet there are images there of the burning cars and radar systems, which remind you there is a price to be paid in order to gain this dream in the face of a world of violence." The soundtrack to the film was composed and performed by Coil (John Balance, Peter Christopherson, and Stephen Thrower), and it was released as an album of the same title.
