Caravaggio
In his feverish portrait, Jarman sketches the life of Caravaggio, who associated with male lovers, prostitutes and the criminal underclass of early seventeenth-century Rome. The opulent, dazzling film brings together Jarman’s important themes: the plight of the artist, homosexual love and the hypocrisy of ecclesiastical authorities.
From his deathbed in 1610, the impoverished artist Caravaggio looks back on his turbulent love triangle with street thug Ranuccio and Ranuccio’s mistress Lena (brilliantly played by Tilda Swinton, in her film debut). In flashbacks, the film recreates Caravaggio’s original paintings in a series of sublime, stylised tableaux vivants in the painter’s typical chiaroscuro style, with strong, dramatic contrasts between light and dark – a style for which Rembrandt in particular would later become famous.
Caravaggio was a frontal attack on the classic reconstructions that Hollywood tends to make of biopics. Jarman’s idiosyncratic film is deliberately punctuated by anachronisms such as a pocket calculator and Ranuccio’s motorbike. The film was also his most accessible work and proved to be a modest commercial success. For Tilda Swinton, the film marked the beginning of a long and cherished collaboration with Jarman, who would cast the actress in all six of his subsequent films.
Caravaggio won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival.