Caravaggio

This film tells the life story of the 17th-century painter, Caravaggio, from his adolescence to his death.

I find "Caravaggio" not very easy to follow, because characters are not introduced by name; and it also does not help when Caravaggio is played by three different actors! There is little dialog in the film, as many messages are conveyed in the unsaid. This also adds to the difficulty in understanding the plot.

It also tries to push boundaries by having obvious anachronisms. I find myself stopping to think whether these objects exist in those days, which adds to me being more lost. Though I did not particularly enjoyed "Caravaggio", I will give Derek Jarman's films another go though.

Caravaggio (1986)

It's easy to be frustrated by movie that seems by its title to be one thing but is so clearly something else. This is no bio-pic of the great artist. It doesn't even create (to me) a more abstract sense of what it might have meant to be such an artist, or to be creative and tormented and a scrappy, sometimes ill man.

Instead it's a movie that uses some themes, and some paintings, of Caravaggio and builds a completely invented (to my knowledge) story line. For one thing, it's set in some fairly recent time--the 1920s or 30s, perhaps? And it's highly highly British, which is no flaw, but it feels part of a 1980s London underground in the expressions and vocabulary. If you can open up to all that, you've made a first step. If you can't, forget it. Run to another version (like the terrific new Italian one from 2007).

The second step is key, too, however, for many of you. This is an overtly homo-erotic, or at least homosexually charged fantasy. It has no overt sex (though there is lots of kissing all around) and it does includes some female actors (including a fabulous Tilda Swinton), but there are lots of "pretty boy" scenes and a sensibility that is just frankly different than the usual film world mainstream.

That's a great thing. That doesn't however make the movie completely work. It's worth watching if you are prepared for its tone, and it's brilliant in some sense, utterly original, a kind of high production value, high culture flip side to the films of Andy Warhol (if that makes any sense at all). There are excesses in violence, bloody, death, love, corporal pleasure and corporal torture--but these are exactly what the 1980s were all about. Think of Robert Mapplethorpe.

It's not my own world at all, but I found it a kind of thrill to see made so rich and colorful, so unexpected every turn. And so photographically beautiful. It is at times disturbing and moving, but mostly it is pretty and fascinating. It lacks a more usual structure, but you get used to that and learn to like it.

What we know of Caravaggio suggests a strutting brawler with a healthy sense of entitlement who lived amongst whores and thieves and hustlers and put them on canvas. His works' themes were sex, death, redemption, above all, finding the sacred within the profane. He lived at a time where homosexuality carried a death sentence and political intrigue normally involved fatalities in a society defined by the maxim "strangling the boy for the purity of his scream".

You can't fault Derek Jarman for his cinematography, nor his recreations of Caravaggio's paintings and you certainly can't accuse the man of shying away from the homosexuality. But frankly, Jarman never strays beyond 80s caricature. Italian patronage becomes the 80s London art scene complete with pretty waiters and calculators. Sean Bean is a sexy bit of Northern rough oiling his motorbike. Tilda Swinton performs a transformation worthy of a Mills and Boons ("Why, Miss Lena, without that gypsy headscarf, you're beautiful..."). Jarman provides Caravaggio with a particularly trite motive for the murder which left him exiled.

This could have been a visually stunning treatment of a man whose life was dangerous, exciting, violent and decadent but who nonetheless elevated the lives of ordinary people to the status of Renaissance masterpieces, looked on by Emperors and Kings. Instead, what you get is Pierre et Gilles do Italy. The pretty bodies of young boys are shown to perfection, but never the men who inhabit them. Jarman appears to satirise the London art scene, showing it shallow and pretentious. To use Caravaggio and Renaissance Italy to make the point is to use a silk purse to make a pig's ear. In fairness, this film remains visually stunning, but ultimately as two dimensional as the paintings it describes.

I tend to define myself as an artist and I consider my mind broad enough to welcome any artistic license coming from a director whom I also consider an artist... but when a historical biopic supposedly tells you the story of an artist of the caliber of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio and by some burst of inspiration, the director Derek Jarman decides to insert anachronistic details that go from people wearing suits, tuxedos or sights as incongruous as a bike or a typewriter... I can help but feel a certain resistance to whatever should appeal to me at that moment. To put it simply, that turned me off.

We're speaking of a few random scenes that didn't affect the story in a way or another, and their needlessness made me even angrier... I know there's a way to interpret everything, maybe some iconoclastic approach to a man who himself was a revolutionary painter and initiator of the Baroque school, with its high contrast of lights and dark shadows and very expressive style, maybe it was Jarman's ambition to pay tribute to the painter and the project took him so long and underwent so many incidents he didn't care for realism, using the 'Italy of his memory' according to his photographer, but there are so many magnificent shots in the film that recreate the texture of the latest years of the Renaissance and even the color of the initial painting that my mind kept wondering Why? What was the purpose to all that?

Now, I've said it... and having said that, I can say that I enjoyed the look of the film and its recreation of some of Caravaggio's paintings, not that I could recall them all, in fact, I'm not familiar with his work but that didn't matter at all, any scene could have been painting material and last films to made me feel that were "Barry Lyndon" and "Cries and Whispers" (with its long contemplative monologues told in voice-over, the film did have a Bergmanian quality of its own). The use of contrast, the dust and even the dirt looked somewhat appealing creating a sort of shadowy texture that enriched the skin complexion, it's a marvel of recreation and the first twenty minutes had me literally hooked. The part with Dexter Fletcher playing young Caravaggio (the one who impersonated Bacchus in a famous painting) with the ambiguous strange relationship going with a Cardinal (Michael Gough) was my favorite.

The second part is more of a ptachwrok of scenes where it's difficult to keep a certain feeling of continuity but we get the attraction between the painter (now older, played by Nigel Terry) and two models (Sean Bean who's way too good looking not to be distracting ) and Tilda Swinton. The scenes works so well visually but the narration keeps us in the shadow, and maybe it betrays the fact that Jarman was so immersed in his character that he only left us a few breeches to wriggle through, as a character study, I didn't find the passionate artist or whatever wood made the fire of his creativity burn, the passion was there but it was diluted in that feeling of detachment, of randomness that made it very hard to follow... it's hard to make movies about painters, to understand their painting, you've got to see their vision, to hear their mind and I guess I simply couldn't connect myself and my mind was stubbornly sticking to these iconoclasts details that they gave me the feeling tat Jackman didn't care for authenticity, only for mood.

In my prime as a movie watcher, I would have given the film another 'chance' (or myself) but I don't think I would get it any better, anyway, it is a good film but looks more like an art-house for which the word 'pretentious' was invented, a picture meant for students, rather than a biopic for the average watcher. I didn't like the film for several reasons and perhaps the most vivid one is that it makes me feel like a conventional schmuck who can't enjoy art or understand it. I wouldn't call it pretentious but there's something rather vain in the way one appropriate himself a character and twists his life like that, even for the sake of art. Or maybe to use a hackneyed version, I didn't get it and now, I'm among the users who rated the film low enough to earn it a rating above 7...

What we know of the life of Caravaggio is unfortunately incredibly limited. The narrative of this film does not really reflect that limited knowledge. From the disjunctive remains of one of the most important figures of all western art A narrative has been formed. The merits of this narrative are debatable and ultimately unimportant. The overwhelming strength of this film lies in the superb cinematography and the incorporation of Caravaggio's artwork into the film. Light emanates from an off screen point, bathing the shot in chiaruscuro lighting that was so signature of his work. The color of the film could be taken from his palate directly. Best of all was when his paintings were played out by the actors. The result is no less than a visually stunning presentation.