March 26--The biggest selling album of 1977 was Fleetwood Mac's "Rumours." In the words of Spin magazine, it was music made by "rich, luxuriating hippie sophisticates who cavorted like sprites and nymphs and sipped chardonnay."
It also was the year of "Saturday Night Fever" and Billy Joel's "The Stranger." Of Jimmy Buffett's "Margaritaville" and the Eagles' "Hotel California." It saw the birth of Studio 54, the death of Elvis Presley and the silver jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II.
The very same year, something else entirely was happening. Punk shoved its grotty boot into the pop culture firmament, slicing through the melodic grooves and feathered hair of the rock establishment with pair of seminal albums from the Clash and the Sex Pistols.
1977 was also the year that filmmaker Derek Jarman began work on "Jubilee," a swaggering, nutso-punk burlesque that envisions Britain as a burned-out hellscape overrun by nihilists and violent girl gangs.
The film screens this weekend at Chicago Filmmakers (and again on Wednesday at Columbia College Chicago), and it features a cast that includes Adam Ant (all of 22 or 23 at the time), Ian Charleson (who would go on to star in "Chariots of Fire" as the Olympic runner Eric Liddell) and the visual force of nature that was Pamela Rooke, who renamed herself Jordan while still a teen and became a street fashion provocateur who used her face as a canvas for cubist slashes of makeup. She was the closest thing the punk scene had to an "It" girl.
At the time she was part of an inner circle that included Malcolm McLaren (a onetime manager of the Sex Pistols) and Vivienne Westwood, who together operated the Kings Road punk boutique called SEX, later called Seditionaries.
Punk wasn't really director Jarmon's scene. A filmmaker and queer activist, he was an outsider who found his way in (as most do) through a chance encounter.
The film stars British actress Jenny Runacre in a double role. She plays both the androgynous leader of a girl gang and Queen Elizabeth I in full regalia. The latter travels 400 years from the 16th century into the future with her court occultist (Richard O'Brien, better known as the creator of "The Rocky Horror Show") to get a look at her kingdom near the tail end of the 20th century.
Runacre wrote about the film's origins on her website not long ago, explaining how Jarman recruited his cast.
"Adam Ant he had seen walking down the Kings Road in a dirty white shirt ripped to show the word ('F---') that Jordan had carved on his back with a razor blade! Adam had been on the way to Seditionaries -- the shop owned by Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren -- around which the whole punk movement had blossomed. Derek had immediately asked him to be in the film."
Later, Runacre and Jarman would go to Sex Pistols concert "where Jordan and Vivienne Westwood had both thrown themselves about with wild abandon hurling insults at the audience and at the band. Jordan had on her geometrical makeup with a great mauve swath of colour across her face and her bondage shoes, and she gyrated and bad-mouthed her way onto stage where she and Johnny Rotten then proceeded to strip."
You can see how the seeds for a movie might get started. These mouthy kids with their spiked hair and kiss-off mentality, who wouldn't want to film them? To capture not just the anger and disillusionment, but the visual aesthetics, which work as a handy anti-authoritarian shorthand and (kind of remarkably) still come across as alien and futuristic.
In many ways, the movie is terrible. The performances are mannered, the story nonexistent, the dialogue mostly indigestible. But it is also full of terrific bluster and sidelong comedy, a "Who-cares!" exuberance coupled with a bleakness that Jarman captures in the corners of the frame, including the sight of a pram, aflame and abandoned on an empty street. Not even baby carriages are safe!
The characters have names like Mad and Crabs and Sphinx and Angel. Adam Ant plays a beautiful naif called Kid. Jordan is Amyl Nitrite, dressed in a sweater twin set and pearls along with her signature makeup and sky-rise coiffure, like some kind of alternative universe offspring of Martha Stewart and Johnny Rotten.
The website Open Culture describes "Jubilee" as a "John Waters movie without the gross-out gags," and that feels about right.
Rebecca Lavoie is a queer cinema scholar and she will be talking about the film at both screenings. "I like thinking about how this was a strong reaction to the '70s," she told me. "The punks were like, 'No, it's not all harmony and cannabis' and all that was dominant in the '70s. They were like, 'No, natural is not better' ... instead it is this crazy urban decay where basically Jarman is saying, 'OK, all political systems have failed.'"
Here's Runacre: "England was indeed in a great state of change in the mid 70's, the, by now comatose, hippies had had the rug pulled from under their feet by a gang of King's Road fashion anarchists who called themselves punks."
It's fair to say punk, at that time, was thought of as "quite opposite to queer in the sense that it's this masculine scene, very macho and even homophobic," as Lavoie put it. And yet Jarman quite astutely anticipated the queering of punk and the eventual emergence of the riot grrrl scene in the '90s.
The '90s are also when Jarman died (in 1994) from AIDS-related causes. Runacre, now in her 70s, still acts. Toyah Willcox, who plays the lumpy buzz-cut pyro called Mad, adopted a more glamorous look in the years since the movie. Her resume includes voices for "Teletubbies," of all things.
Adam Ant, who is 60, partied through his career peak in the '80s, but he wore his fame uncomfortably. An untreated bipolar disorder didn't help things. Even under treatment he has had some issues, crossing paths with the British authorities more than once.
And that fashion firebrand Jordan? According to a 2004 interview with The Guardian, she "now breeds cats and works as a veterinary nurse."
"Jubilee" screens at 8 p.m. Saturday at Chicago Filmmakers and 6:30 p.m. Wednesday at Columbia College Chicago. Rebecca Lavoie will talk about the film at both screenings. Go to chicagofilmmakers.org.
Spaced out
A Russian cosmonaut battles an unnerving situation in 1972's sci-fi psychological drama "Solaris" (not to be confused with Steven Soderbergh's 2002 remake of the same name starring George Clooney), which screens next week with a post-show conversation moderated by Josh Larsen (co-host of WBEZ's "Filmspotting") and Dr. Jesse Soodalter, an oncologist at the University of Chicago whose research focuses on "individual and societal thinking about death" and why we're so freaked out about discussing our own mortality. 7 p.m. Tuesday at the Music Box Theatre. Go to musicboxtheatre.com or http://bit.ly/1HDUR4s.
The remake before the remake
"Ben-Hur" is getting a remake, and this week it was announced that Jack Huston, best known for his haunting performance on "Boardwalk Empire" as a war vet missing half his face, has been cast in the title role. The biblical-era story -- of a Jewish nobleman betrayed by a friend and enslaved by the Romans, a man who seeks revenge and finds redemption -- was first adapted in a 1925 silent film. The more famous 1959 version, from director William Wyler and starring Charlton Heston, screens Wednesday at the Pickwick Theatre in Park Ridge as part of programmer Matthew Hoffman's "Cinema of Transcendence" series (which continues through June 4). Go cinemaoftranscendence.wordpress.com or parkridgeclassicfilm.com/film-schedule/.
nmetz@tribpub.com
