Sebastiane (1976)
Directed by Derek Jarman
Rome, AD 303. Emperor Diocletian demotes his favourite, Sebastian, from captain of the palace guard to the rank of common soldier and banishes him to a remote coastal outpost where his fellow soldiers, weakened by their desires, turn to homosexual activities to satisfy their needs. Sebastian becomes the target of lust for the officer Severus, but repeatedly rejects the man's advances. Castigated for his Christian faith, he is tortured, humiliated and ultimately killed.
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What critics compared Sebastiane to
His bulging tighty-whities notwithstanding, Fernando’s immobilized, semi-nude form can’t help but evoke the martyrdom of St. Sebastian, an event that inspired numerous Renaissance paintings as well as an explicitly homoerotic retelling in Derek Jarman’s 1976 film, “Sebastiane.”
After an extended sequence that takes place during a Roman orgy and recalls Kenneth Anger’s gaudy Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, the locale shifts to a remote military outpost, where the rest of the film unfolds.
As has already been widely reported, Stone has also approached Alexanderâs famed bisexuality with an openness and lack of sensationalism that, while not exactly radical by the standards of, say, Derek Jarmanâs Sebastiane, is certainly the closest a major-studio feature has come to advocating for gays in the military.
Jarman, the British director who suffers from AIDS and whose past work ("Caravaggio" and "Sebastiane," among others) has dealt openly with gay themes, has found in Edward a martyred hero, a victim of repression and injustice whose obsessional passion for another man, the despised Gaveston, leads to his overthrow and savage murder.
In previous films, like Sebastiane and Caravaggio, Jarman had already begun his examination of sexual politics and gay aesthetics.
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Similarly to The Gospel According to St. Matthew, also directed by a gay man, it�s difficult to tell from what�s on screen alone whether or not Sebastiane is celebrating the Saint or deriding the religion that chose him as an ideal.