| Caravaggio is probably the closest Derek Jarman ever came to making a mainstream film. As it reveals the seventeenth-century painter’s complex life—his brilliant, nearly blasphemous paintings and flirtations with the underworld—it is also a uniquely complex and lucid treatment of Jarman’s major concerns: violence, history, homosexuality, and the relationship between film and painting. Caravaggio incorporates the painter’s precise aesthetic into the movie’s own visuals and uses the style and mood of his paintings to reflect his life. The result is Jarman’s most profound, unsettling and astonishing reflection on art, sexuality and identity. |