Blue

BLUE is British militant gay filmmaker Derek Jarman's final film, and the only one to bring his anger to bear explicitly on the disease that finally claimed him. Constructed in layers of sound and orchestral bridges over an unvarying blue matte screen, the film is a meditation on many things--life, love, politics, metabolism. "All that concerns life and death is transacting within me," the voiceover claims.

The unapologetically poetic narration combines observations and epiphanies, at times seemingly lifted straight from journal entries, with an ongoing description of the body's failings against the onslaught of AIDS. The latter provides the film with its narr...