Caravage

The hypocrisy of key Church figures who condemn the sensuality of the painter, all the while competing to hoard his art seems bizarre, the figure of Caravaggio becomes an attractive and sympathetic revolutionary hero in a secular era. While his animalistic rutting grosses me out he gets the best lines. The investigator who travels around interviewing witnesses is so intent on his task he becomes one-dimensional. But the film suffers from such poor narrative construction that it becomes tedious and repetitive, gradually dulling my interest. If the powerful originality of the artist's output were shown more clearly I would have found it more enjoyable.

The movie is the story of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio who was an Italian painter in the 16th century, through the eyes of the Pope's investigator. He was known for painting "what he saw", some kind of reality that he wanted close to the divine, which was of course not ok with the Catholic Church. Within his paintings, you could see famous prostitutes, hoboes, represented as saints, such as Mary or St Peter. His life has multiple legends around it, he was known to have sexual relationships with both males and females, while painting for the Church, and his competitors tried to destroy him for that. He had to flee Rome after killing (accidentally?) someone and lived in Naples, Sicily, Malta, etc. The story of the movie is a bit long, but this is not why you should see this movie. The whole movie is staged as a painting, with that kind of atmosphere that you get from 16th century Italian paintings. Would I watch it again? No, but I am happy I watched it.

I have watched the movie at the cinema, in Timisoara. The movie looks to carefully illustrate the life of the painter. The actors and the actresses are very nice interpretating their roles. The scenes, the costumes, the colours and the decorations are very loyal to the XVII secol, when Caravaggio lived. The main actor, playing as Caravaggio, is a great actor, full of passion.

It is interesting, and still present on our days) the conflict in understanding what is the good and what is bad, because the bad can be find in good and viceversa. And of course, this is an unique truth for each of us.

Even the movie is 2 hours long, I have not figured out when the time passed.

Congratulations to all actors and for the entire team of the movie!

I just thought that this movie about such big artist would have more art in it. The process and the hard work. Instead, all I got was already finished paintings and an italian telenovela with more dialogue than Nolan's Oppenheimer, with no time to absorb the beauty of the cinematography and the poetic essence of Caravaggio's life and his work.

But I thought using Schatten's perspective of interviewing Caravaggio's models and other people he met and capturing their narratives and stories so the viewer can learn more about the artist was smart and the story came nicely full circle at the end. But that still doesn't compensate the rest for me.

Riccardo Scamarcio has a nice butt tho.

Caravaggio's Shadow is a fever dream of a film, vividly photographed and convincingly played by an (unsurprisingly) handsome Italian cast.

There's plenty of melodrama, but it's an Italian period piece; anything less would have felt restrained.

At the heart of it is an irresolvable contradiction: the Vatican and papacy are the immensely rich and powerful core of Catholicism, but Catholicism is anchored by the teachings of Jesus, friend of the poor, the outcast and the desperate. What happens when the Vatican's most talented painter - a devout genius - uses the poor, the disgraced, and the outcasts of society as his subjects in seeking the truth of scripture?

Expect plenty of debauchery, plenty of on-location renaissance architecture, some intrigue, and even some swashbuckling swordfighting.

Worth your time.