“The Garden is as mystifying as it is intense.”-Janet Maslin

“'Sadness is all I have, no words'” is a line that sums it up."-Derek Jarman

Jarman the gardener is a dreamer . . . His starting points are his own failing body, his home, and his garden. From these, his inner self conjures the dreams that fill the film, some rooted in his own secret desires, some drawn from his long-established interests as an artist, some born from his impotent anger at the world. Their scope is very wide indeed, from warm childhood memories to a song “quoted” from a Hollywood movie, from the Gospel According to Jarman to an agonizingly protracted nightmare in which two gay men are tarred and feathered by their persecutors… Its locus is that strange demilitarized zone between waking and sleeping where the inner self comes up against material realities, and neither prevails over the other.