esrosedotblog

ART ON RUN

Today's gay favorite is actually not on the list. I added it.

Caravaggio (1986).

Derek Jarman, now gone, wrote and directed this film about an Italian Baroque artist about whom little is known. Except for his work and the shadows of scandal surrounding his affairs with a street tough and a whore. A triangle. Bisexual but very much on the gay side.

Look, there is no figuring out the plot as such. There are many sequences based on the artist painting his works from life models. Tableau vivants. He gets involved with politics and church, the same thing, and carries own in in a sinful way, meaning he doesn't do what they want. Finally, thrown into exile.

Sean Bean is the street tough who holds the show together. Early Tilda Swinton is the whore and Caravaggio is played by Nigel Terry with some nice work by Michael Gough as a cardinal who takes Caravaggio on as a child prodigy.

My take on this film is that they let Jarman do what he wanted as long as the bisexual element was emphasized. Jarman himself was a militant gay artist and film maker who always had a point. Here I think that it is that there are no rules in love and you live with the mess you make but, by all means, make the mess first and foremost.

The cinematography mimics Caravaggio's painting style which uses a sort of unreal light from one angle only which creates strangely life like effects in the paintings themselves even though they are against traditional technique and, in reality do not really look real even though they end up looking hyper real.

Much of the artistic stuff is implied but the light source is always artificial, a polished gold panel which is held to the models to get this weird effect.

So the film is visually stunning.

What goes on in it are the mental images of a dying man, the artist, at the end of his rope. So a lot of it is surreal and distorted. Certainly out of sequence. We have to fill it in and that is not really possible.

I put it in here because bisexuality does count as, at least partly, gay and because the homoeroticism is an inch thick no matter who is doing it.

Tilda Swinton's famous for her ability to pass for male and female but this pushes things too much. The film is subjective, not meant to be "real" or accurate. And Jarman is dead so he isn't going to tell us what is going on.

I liked it before and I liked it again and I will almost certainly see it again some day.

A 5 out of Netflix5 and a definite item in any gay film collection.

Here is also an unrelated film short about the tableau vivantes that are similarly in the film.

Labels: films, gay films