Caravaggio (1986)

 

Caravaggio

A historic drama from the seventeenth century about real people I did not know sounds like my jam. Unfortunately, this was an all-round disappointment.

Michelangelo Caravaggio (Nigel Terry) was an actual Italian painter during the Baroque period (early seventeenth century). This is supposedly A version of his story, stressing the “a”, told in episodic form. This means non-linearity long before Christopher Nolan made it a Hollywood standard. One storyline finds Caravaggio on his deathbed, suffering from lead poisoning. Another follows him in his youth where he enters the household of Cardinal Del Monte (Michael Gough), partly to paint, partly for sex. Later in life, he meets Ranuccio (Sean Bean) and Lena (Tilda Swinton), both as models but also for sex. He also takes on a mute boy, Jerusaleme (Spencer Leigh) as an assistant.

There is a lot of painting (marginally interesting) with people striking poses (not interesting) and screwing around, everybody with everybody (dirty, ugly and creepy). Eventually Lena is murdered for getting pregnant with a rich patron.

That is essentially what I got out of it.

I suppose my main problem is that I went into this movie on the wrong premise, thinking I was to watch a historic drama, but instead this was a surreal fable with an obscure point. When electronic pocket calculators, cigarettes, motor bicycles and electric lights started to appear, I was completely thrown. Obviously, this is not a historic account. Causality is thrown out the window and nothing is supposed to make logical sense. Director Derk Jarman clearly wanted to make an allegory in the style of “El Topo” or “Satyricon”, both themselves from a period in film history where the movies seemed to be on LSD.

This basically means that the apparent plot is indifferent and the real story must be found in symbols and metaphors. Because of the former, I gradually lost interest in the story. Nothing made any sense to me and even worse, I stopped to care. It is always a bad sign when you start checking the timer and here it felt like a countdown to relief. For the latter, I never got around to decode the actual story. There are hints that Caravaggio is a Christ figure, at least the last pose is of him dead with the wounds of Christ, but otherwise the whole thing felt like an excuse to showcase sex. Not the sex of love, but as a depravity. Now, depravity is in the eye of the beholder, but Jarman goes a long way to present the sex in this context as ugly, filthy and guilt-ridden. Sex between older men and boys, Sex between men and women and especially men and men. Religious people indulging in sex and so on.

The general impression is one of nausea. I felt literally filthy watching the movie. If there is something else in the movie, I can live with that, I am not that much of a prude. The problem here is that there is nothing else. The story line has no relevance, the actual plot is too obscure for me, and I felt nothing for the characters, in large part because the director is so busy using them for symbolic effect that he neglected fleshing them out. Even the main character, Caravaggio we end up knowing very little about, and what we do get to know is implicitly false because causality has been lost.

I suppose the highlight is that we get to see a young Sean Bean and equally young Tilda Swinton here, but I doubt these are the roles they will be remembered for.

I do understand why “Caravaggio” would be celebrated by critics, especially in art circles. There is so much critics-bait here, but it is also typical for why that class of movies has such a poor reputation in the general public. I think David Lynch is cool, the weirder the better and I dig Jim Jarmusch, but this stuff here is not my jam. Not at all.