Caravaggio
Writer/director Derek Jarman injects his patented iconoclasm in this biography of Renaissance artist Michelangelo Merisa da Caravaggio. Nigel Terry plays the title role, whom (according to Jarman) essentially told his own life story in his paintings. Caravaggio travelled among thieves and prostitutes, many of whom were his models. He once killed a man, kept a deaf/mute child as a virtual slave, and squandered every penny he ever made. That we should care anything about so miserable and obscure a personality is a tribute to Jarman's filmmaking savvy--and the number of elements from his own well-publicized life that he injects into the film.
Director: Derek Jarman
Starring: Nigel Terry, Sean Bean, Garry Cooper, Spencer Leigh, Tilda Swinton
Much of the joy of the film is to be found in the way Jarman and his team recreate the look and color of the original paintings.
It's often beautiful to watch, although it's more interested in visual style than philosophical depth.
Marrying a painterly aesthetic with a defiantly homosexual sensibility, this ironic biopic is probably the most accessible film of avant-garde British director Derek Jarman.
In a sense, Caravaggio has less to do with its ostensible subject than with Jarman's own insistence on sensual, and largely homoerotic, expression, though there's a feeling of stifling enclosure to the images Jarman invents, of eros turned inward, toward private fantasy and longing, rather than outward to a world of real possibility.
Less a movie than an act of vandalism.
Derek Jarman
Berlin International Film Festival (1986)
Derek Jarman
Istanbul International Film Festival (1987)
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