Critics reviews

[Jarman's] visually beautiful, sly and idiosyncratic biographical portrait of the great 17th-century Italian artist is an enduring delight, and particularly interesting relative to contemporary discourse concerning artists behaving badly.

Beautifully lit, vibrant with colour, and carefully, if minimally, designed, Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio (1986) has an immediate aesthetic appeal that links it more easily with the history of arthouse filmmaking than his other, more jagged, rough-and-ready works.

What perhaps most sounds like Jarman, though, is when he discusses how Caravaggio used prostitutes as models for his religious iconography; Jarman’s film is likewise a concerted bastardization of artwork that many revere for its baroque grandeur... CARAVAGGIO is a gorgeous celebration of beauty and filth, and no one does that better than Jarman.

For all the melodrama of the story, however, he has elected a style of grave serenity, composed of looks and glances, long silences in shaded rooms, sudden eruptions of blood. It all works miraculously well, even the conscious use of anachronisms and the street sounds of contemporary Italy.

Arguably the most accessible of his films, it remains a testament to his distinctive visual style. Taking a leaf out of Pasolini's book, Jarman jettisons period authenticity in favour of highly aestheticised spaces, filled with beautifully composed and lit pictorial tableaux. The theatrical acting and dialogue, as well as the occasional token anachronism - designed to emphasise the artificiality of it all - only succeeds in patches, and occasionally verges on the ridiculous.

Some may find the parallel between Christ and Caravaggio heavy-handed, but the film grapples ardently with the portrayal of an artist's life in ways that must have inspired films such as Love is the Devil (1998), John Maybury's portrait of Francis Bacon and Looking for Langston (1989), Isaac Julien's meditation on Langston Hughes.

A former painter, costume designer and set decorator, Jarman has a routinely tasteful sense of handsome compositions, but there isn't a shot in the movie that makes you sit up and take notice. His cloddishness makes you see "Caravaggio" less as a tribute than some odd, and oddly irritating, effort at assassination.

It’s a good film, but it won’t be to every taste. Jarman, once a set designer for Ken Russell (“The Devils”), has been a painter himself, and he gets across the feel and texture of painting--the touch of oils--far better than most respectful documentaries or artist-bios you could name...