Blue is an arresting quasi-movie with one or two jaw-dropping moments. Its radical experiment with style – the absence of all visuals, in favour of an unchanging electric blue screen – makes it more suitable for the art gallery than the cinema and ultimately this makes it a less than stellar movie. It gets a bit like staring into a talking, musical electronic mosquito zapper and is fairly impossible to sit through, but letting it play on the VCR while you do other things around the house is the way to go: the film’s incredible soundscape makes a great backdrop and at least half a dozen times you’ll be hooked by a shattering line of dialogue, or a cuttingly intelligent observation and you’ll stop, listen and reflect.

Derek Jarman made this film through the blindness of cytomegalovirus retinitis, in the last year of his life. There is no break in the vision in the film: the blue screen starts after the opening credits, and finishes a split second before the closing credits. We see things through Jarman’s extinguished eyes, and hear his semi-mad thoughts. Hypnotic or boring? Some have called Blue a great masterpiece, but in my opinion it fails as a film because it just doesn’t have the basic elements that make films work. Like a car without any wheels, Blue is fascinating and odd, but kind of broken.

Where it does work is in the way it captures Jarman’s raw penultimate thoughts and emotions, his reflections on life, society, science and AIDS as he’s sucked into the abyss. Some of the statements in Blue are utterly incredible, like:

It started with sweats in the night and swollen glands. Then the black cancer spread across their faces - as they fought for breath TB and pneumonia hammered their lungs, and Toxo at the brain. Reflexes scrambled - sweat poured through hair matter like lianas in the tropical forest. Voices slurred - and then were lost forever.

Or:

I shall not win the battle against the virus - in spite of the slogans like "Living with AIDS". The virus was appropriated by the well - so we have to live with AIDS while they spread the quilt for the moths of Ithaca across the wine dark sea.

Or:

In the hospital it is as quiet as a tomb. The nurse fights to find a vein in my right arm. We give up after five attempts. Would you faint if someone stuck a needle into your arm? I've got used to it - but I still shut my eye.

Few films – few anythings – catch this level of AIDS-horrror so effectively, and none do it with such poetic grace. Jarman, Tilda Swinton and others give Jarman’s words extraordinary flight. The power and value of Blue is not in question. It just isn’t really a movie as such, and despite the novelty of a film maker robbed of his sight giving us a movie with no visuals, the film is more poem than movie, and makes for a bit of an endurance test with occasional
treats.