A BOLD, QUIRKY CARAVAGGIO
The Italian Renaissance in pagan and poetic glory
by Edward Behr
Newsweek
May 5, 1986
Michelangelo Merisi Caravaggio (1573 - 1610) was the last, perhaps
the
greatest, and certainly the most controversial painter of the
Italian
Renaissance. The virtual inventor of chiaroscuro (the use of
theatrical light
effects), Caravaggio also dressed the New Testament figures in
his pictures in
the clothing of his own contemporaries. He took pimps, prostitutes
and street
urchins into his studio to pose as sensuous, sometimes naked
models for the
saints. This shocked - and delighted - his patrons. In an age
when the papacy
itself was self-indulgent, corrupt and immoral, Caravaggio's
bisexuality, his
propensity for violence and his scorn of court conventions made
him the enfant
terrible of the Italian aristocracy. The Medicis, the Modenas
and the Mantuas
bought everything he painted at fees comparable to those Picasso
commanded in
his prime, but they remained wary of an artist who could not
be bought or
tamed.
Jarman, himself a controversial British director whose first
film, Sebastiane,
was a homosexual love story, has now made a movie that in its
own bold and
quirky way is worthy of its subject. The whole of Caravaggio,
which opened in
Britain last week, is shot inside a converted warehouse on the
Isle of Dogs on
the Thames River. Jarman turned the warehouse into the painter's
studio, with
the opulence of Medici palaces and the Vatican hinted at by skillful
use of
drapes, color and a few selected artifacts. In an off-screen
commentary,
Caravaggio (Nigel Terry) tells his life story in flashbacks:
it's a strange,
singularly modern tale - by Jean Genet out of Norman Mailer,
if you will. After
a series of brawls, Caravaggio was officially barred from carrying
weapons in
1605. But then he killed a man and fled to Naples, where he lived
in hiding for
four years. On his journey back to Rome, he was taken for a pirate,
badly
beaten and died of exhaustion and ill treatment. He was 36 years
old.
Jarman has used poetic license to turn what may have been the
casual murder of
an acquaintance into a love story between two handsome, bisexual
and deeply
disturbed men. In Jarman's Caravaggio, actor Terry discovers
Ranuccio Tommasoni
(played by Sean Bean with beefy, rugged, dangerous charm) at
a prizefight. He
bribes him to become his favorite model and falls in love with
him - and with
Ranuccio's mistress, Lena, a courtesan whose clients include
the pope's
brother. There is nothing sentimental or exclusive about the
relationship
between the two men. Caravaggio has other lovers, and it's clear
that
Caravaggio is drawn to Ranuccio because he finds in the tough
male model a
contempt for law and order that mirrors his own. Lena (played
by Tilda Swinton,
an authentic Renaissance beauty who seems to have stepped straight
out of an
original Caravaggio canvas) becomes pregnant. Ranuccio kills
her, Caravaggio
uses her corpse as a model and then stabs Ranuccio to death.
Contemporary touches: The spectacular, painterly camera work
of Mexican-born
Gabriel Beristain makes this film one of the most visually satisfying
in recent
years. And Jarman depicts his characters with the same kinds
of contemporary
touches that Caravaggio used. Ranuccio tinkers with an old motorcycle.
Workers
wear paper hats made out of pages of the modern newspaper L'UnitÓ.
A banker
works out a corrupt deal at the Vatican on a slim electronic
calculator. In his
final death scene, Caravaggio is dressed in a funeral suit of
a typical
Sicilian mafioso, with gold coins placed over his eyes.
Jarman defends his approach by saying that it could not have
been done
otherwise, given his budget (a minuscule $700,000). The language
of the players
is hip, camp, wordly- wise; the Renaissance was an age of cynicism,
and modern
working-class accents aren't jarring. Indeed, the film is so
well made that
even with these potentially disturbing elements, the mood is
much like that of
Caravaggio's paintings - brooding, sensual, pagan in the extreme.
Those who recall Jarman's "scandalous" reputation for
depicting homosexual love
and violence will be disappointed. Caravaggio is chaste, poetic
and restrained.
True, the British Board of Film Censors has declared that only
people 18 years
old or more may be admitted, but that can only be explained in
terms of latent
homophobia. The film is as erotic as a Caravaggio painting, which
means it's
about 100 times more tasteful than what millions of 10-year-olds
watch on
television every night.