The Last of England Movie Review

“Impressionistic” doesn’t have to mean “bad” -- but when the images are disjointed, clichéd, and disgusting, it pretty much does. The Last of England, an experimental film by the late Derek Jarman, begins with a man masturbating on a poster and goes downhill from there. The images include sequences of terrorists holding hostages (but we never find out who they are), kids standing on piles of rubble, a bride cutting her wedding dress with a pair of scissors, homoerotic (but not very erotic) sex scenes, and a pale, skinny naked man eating a dead bird. It’s graphic and disorienting, yet also totally trite.

In the early part of the film, a narrator solemnly intones Eliot-like observations about the decline of England, post-industrial anomie, growing up in the Midland suburbs, or whatever. He rages against the upper class, the bureaucracies, or who knows what. Maybe The Last of England is supposed to be a comment about Thatcher (after decades of socialism, the British Left somehow managed to blame Thatcher for rampant unemployment and poverty). But it’s hard to infer anything from endless, out-of-focus looped footage of demolished buildings and dancing drag queens. The title’s right, though. If this film is any indication, the country that produced the Industrial Revolution, Newton, Darwin and Shakespeare is barely registering a cultural pulse.

The Last of England gets one star, but only because that is the lowest rating allowed by filmcritic.com policy. It really doesn’t deserve any stars. I would say it’s one of the worst films ever made, but that would make it sound more interesting than it actually is.