Caravaggio

This is not a mainstream movie. You may be very distracted by the presence of jokey 20th century anachronisms in this otherwise grave movie about the artistic genius, Caravaggio. 17th century merchants use hand-held calculators, modern instruments play at the parties, local scribes use typewriters, servants dress in modern dinner jackets. I sure don't know what it all means. I guess you can impute many meanings to it.

You may also be irritated by the director in his insistence that everyone is motivated by homoerotic impulses. This facet of the presentation is really more about Derek Jarman than Caravaggio.

Well, I'm not sure that the movie has much to say about Caravaggio at all. After all, Caravaggio shocked his era with his revisionist hagiography - saints with peasant faces, torn clothes and dirty fingernails - probably realistic but iconoclastic in its time, and contrary to a century of previous tradition. Moreover, Caravaggio almost invented the modern system of a consistently represented light source, showing the actual impact of light on his subjects. These key points are barely touched by the script.

But I think you probably should just let those irritations wash over you, and accept the movie for what it is. It uses the style and mood of his paintings to reflect his life, and it incorporates that precise aesthetic into the movie's own visuals. The movie looks like what Caravaggio's own moving pictures might have looked like if he could have created them in 1600.

Is it a good movie? Who knows? It's not so well remembered after a decade or so, but it exhibits a memorable gift for creating and sustaining a mood, and for breathing life into Caravaggio's canvases. It also speculates about the everyday life that must have circulated around the creation of those masterpieces.

I was willing to forgive a lot of artistic pretension and rhetorical dialogue for the superb visuals and atmosphere, and I took vivid memories away from the film. You may feel the same way.

Few moviegoers would know that the real Caravaggio was a convicted criminal and even by today's standards, a hell raiser. Rome's police records list fourteen citations in six years, from public nuisance to several violent assaults. In May of 1606 he murdered a friend, one Ranuccio Tomassoni in a sword fight. Added to these lurid details, his sexual interests show that he freely drifted from the Vatican's ordained model. This makes Caravaggio an interesting person, but a highly complex candidate for a biographic investigation on film.

While Derek Jarman's film captures (with delightful conceit) many of the surface details of Caravaggio's life, it's a work of startling genius because it succeeds on a far more profound level. Jarman tells the story of Caravaggio rather like Caravaggio would paint, infusing it (effortlessly) with the central themes of his life's deepest convictions, creating a portrait which reflects the subject and the artist with equal relevance. What's more, many of the same themes that have been identified with both artists - sexuality, transcendence, violence, censorship, politics (religious/sexual) and the tumultuous source of creative identity are present in both men. It works as very few films do. This is also an unusually accessible film for Derek Jarman. The performances are entertaining and it's filmed with astounding beauty and simplicity. This film is a masterpiece.

However, because of it's homosexual themes and personal tone, "Caravaggio" is likely to be appreciated only by those viewers who weary of film as simple diversion and long for something more challenging. This is a powerful artistic statement, but it flew under the radar during a decade of British film-making where "Gandhi", "Chariots of Fire" and "A Room With A View" represented the best of what was being made. While those films are great in their way, this film value is greater in terms of bravura and personal expression. See it if you can.

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.

Quite simply unlike any other biographical film you will ever see, Derek Jarman's acclaimed production of Caravaggio (1986) is a lovingly constructed, highly personal cross-reference of tormented sixteenth century genius, twentieth century iconography and a somewhat satire on the shallowness of the burgeoning eighties' art scene of which Jarman was very much part of. Exploring Caravaggio's life through his work, the film distinctively merges fact, fiction, legend and imagination in a bold and confident approach that will probably leave serious art enthusiasts and casual viewers outraged by the complete disregard for accurate, historical storytelling.

Shot with a typically avant-garde approach, director/writer Jarman doesn't so much fashion a biography of the artist, but rather, creates a personal reflection of the man using intimate characteristics that appeal to his film-making sensibilities. This makes Caravaggio more of an interpretation of the filmmaker than the artist himself; somewhat self-indulgently focusing on Caravaggio's struggle with bisexuality, perfectionism and wanton obsession; perhaps even glossing over the more intricate workings of the character, for instance, his own passion for art and his battles with the various religious and creative constraints of the period.

It's a shame some of these ideas aren't further elaborated upon, because, at its heart, Caravaggio is really an exceptional film. As I commented earlier, it's perhaps unlike any other film you will ever see; an iconoclastic vision with a cinematic imagination that knows no bounds. Caravaggio is a film in which a 16th century setting gives way to the various anachronisms of passing trains, tuxedos, motorbikes, typewriters and chic nightclub settings. It is a film in which every frame is rendered in reference to the artist's work, composed with rich, shadowy colours that bring to mind the contrast between fresh and rotting fruit, and an unrivalled interplay between sound and production design that is reminiscent in its intense savagery of two dogs angrily ripping each other to pieces.

There is no other 'based on fact film' that has demonstrated such a wild and evocative recreation of real-life hysteria and events, with the possible exception of Peter Jackson's masterful Heavenly Creatures (1994) or even some of Jarman's subsequent projects like Edward II (1991) and Wittgenstein (1994). With a cast of now very well known faces, such as Nigel Terry, Sean Bean, Tilda Swinton, Michael Gough, Dexter Fletcher and Robbie Coltrane - not to mention some of the most beautiful photography ever committed to film - Caravaggio represents an impressive and enjoyable combination of art and cinema that is now, twenty years on, ripe for rediscovery.

Michelangelo Caravaggio was an important Italian painter who led a short, tumultuous life. He surrounded himself with earthy street people who became the models for his paintings.

If you're looking for a biopic about the life of Caravaggio, look elsewhere. This chaotic and bizarre interpretation of his life by avant-garde director Derek Jarman is like seeing art history on a bad acid trip. The story opens well enough around the year 1600, and I thought I was seeing things the first time I saw someone in a 20th century tuxedo. I scratched my head at the calculator, but the motorbike and truck were too much. The use of anachronistic images and odd sound effects (trains, crashing ocean waves) was too jarring and distracting for me. There is little dialogue and the narration was incomprehensible. As a fan of Caravaggio's work, I did enjoy the scenes that showed models posing for his famous paintings, but the rest - a montage of unrelated scenes showing his depraved lifestyle - was just distasteful and speculative. I learned nothing of the man and more about the director.

Tilda Swinton made a memorable screen debut in the puzzling role of a young street woman and a very young Sean Bean is interesting as her companion, but Nigel Terry was a confusing and off-putting Caravaggio. Not recommended.