CARAVAGGIO Movie Review

By combining the familiar shape and structure of Hollywood biography with a vividly bold, colorful, avant-garde visual design, Derek Jarman won over many of his detractors with this elegant, entertaining, and engagingly witty dissection of the life, art, and passion of Caravaggio. The film opens in 1610 when, near death, Caravaggio reflects back on scenes from a life in which many of the same issues that have affected young artists throughout the centuries—money, commitment, independence, sexuality—parade through his memory in a series of revealing, Caravaggio-influenced chiaroscuro tableaux. Nigel Terry makes a riveting and full-bodied Caravaggio, Sean Bean plays Ranuccio, the model Caravaggio adored both on and off the canvas, and Tilda Swinton (Orlando, Female Perversions) is Lena, Ranuccio's lover and the model for Caravaggio's Magdalene. Neatly packaging a great deal of information—and perhaps a few too many assumptions—into its 93 minutes, this is one of the few biographical films about an artist that offers more than a simple by-the-numbers tour, leaving the viewer tantalized rather than saturated.

NEXT STOP … Edward II, Wittgenstein, Blue (Jarman)

1986 97m/C GB Nigel Terry, Sean Bean, Tilda Swinton; D: Derek Jarman; W: Derek Jarman; C: Gabriel Beristain; M: Simon Fisher. VHS, LV TPV, FCT, CCN