Caravaggio
Capsule by Pat Graham From the Chicago Reader
Like the aesthetically suspect filmmaker of Jean-Luc Godard's Passion, Derek Jarman devotes much of this free-form meditation on the life and art of Caravaggio (1986) to creating living tableaux of the baroque master's most famous paintings, though the literalizing question of whether the impersonations are "real" enough (they are for the most part, the Deposition staging uncannily so) tends to obscure the subtler things Jarman's doing here. In a sense, Caravaggio's less about its ostensible subject than Jarman's own homoerotic vision, of eros turned inward, toward private fantasy and longing (the film unfolds in a kind of hermetic mental box, with scarcely a hint of an open-air world beyond the closed-in sets). The playing around with period yields some clever anachronistic touches, and the stylized theatricality makes up for occasional bouts of clunky camerawork. With Nigel Terry, Sean Bean, Tilda Swinton, and Michael Gough. 93 min.
