Caravaggio

Zeitgeist Films

Derek Jarman's queer classic finally gets a DVD release; is a reexamination of this pioneering director's work due next? There are a lot of notable firsts on this experimental director's resume: his 1976 biopic about Saint Sebastian was unashamedly homoerotic, and the first film shot entirely in Latin. Jarman later made the punk rock fantasia Jubilee. By Jarman standards, Caravaggio is a fairly straightforward film that tells the life story of the famous Italian Baroque artist, a man whose real life was perhaps more colorful than the somber chiarascuro of his canvases. A brawler and carouser, Caravaggio shocked some of his patrons with his lifestyle, his relationships with his models, and with the realistic (some said sordid) details in his work. In Jarman's imagination the painter was unequivocally queer (the historical facts are a little hazier) and caught up in a tempestuous love triangle with one of his male models and his wife (played by a shockingly young Sean Bean and Tilda Swinton.) But the film's real draw is its cinematography, with stunning compositions that replicate or echo some of Caravaggio's work, and a meditative mood that feels as if you've stepped into a still life.