Caravaggio

By:
In-House Review - Jan 01 1900

This stylishly bold tribute to the volatile artist stars Nigel Terry as the controversial painter torn between his rugged lover (Sean Bean) and his mistress (Tilda Swinton). Jarman sees the darkly handsome Caravaggio as a passionate man with a liking for "rough trade." An elegant tale centering around both the creative process and the touching homoerotic love story of the two men.

By: Amos Lassen

"Caravaggio" by Derek Jarman is a beautiful visionary art film which is the director's take on the life of Caravaggio. Nigel Terry and Sean Bean are the lovers in Jarman's meditation on sexuality, criminality and art. Jarman fictionalizes Caravaggio's life by using the works of the artist as a way to see his life. This is a visually beautiful movie as has become Jarman's trademark. Here the actors and actresses are also beautiful and Sean Bean is amazing as Caravaggio's lover, Ranucio. When he is on the screen, he owns the movie. He possesses great animal magnetism, sexual energy and wild persona grips the film and moves it forward.
Like all of Jarman's films, this is not a mainstream movie. There are several anachronisms here-modern musical instruments play at the parties, 17th century merchants use hand-held calculators, scribes write on typewriters and servants are dressed in modern dinner jackets. I am not sure what this means but I suppose it is to show that the story of Caravaggio is timeless.
We do not know much about the life of Caravaggio and this film does not reflect the little that we know. The merits of Jarman's narrative are debatable but unimportant when thinking about this film. The strength of "Caravaggio" is the wonderful cinematography and the incorporation of his artwork into the film. The color tones of the film seem to have come directly from the artist's palette; they are that strong and beautiful. Therefore the movie has the look of an actual painting.
This is unlike any biographical film you will ever see. We get a satire on the shallowness of the art scene of the 80's and we find that fact and fiction merge. Caravaggio's themes were sex, death, redemption and finding the sacred within the profane. He lived at a time when homosexuality was a crime that carried the death sentence and political intrigues usually involved death in a society defined by the idea of "strangling the boy for the purity of his scream".
Visually this is a stunning look at a man whose life exuded danger, excitement, violence and decadence but who elevated the lives of ordinary people to the status of Renaissance masterpieces.