Caravaggio

1986 Biography

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

Reviews

  • 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.

    - Variety

    19 January 2013

  • It's often beautiful to watch, although it's more interested in visual style than philosophical depth.

    David Sterritt - Christian Science Monitor

    19 January 2013

  • 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.

    - TV Guide

    19 January 2013

  • 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.

    - Chicago Reader

    19 January 2013

  • Less a movie than an act of vandalism.

    - The Washington Post

    19 January 2013

Awards

  • Derek Jarman

    Berlin International Film Festival (1986)

  • Derek Jarman

    Istanbul International Film Festival (1987)