Derek Jarman (1942-1994) was for almost his entire career the enfant terrible of British cinema: his homoerotic feature debut Sebastiane (1976), a retelling of the saint’s story in Latin no less; his punk “celebration” of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee (1977); and his high-camp adaptation of The Tempest (1979) had all raised serious eyebrows; elsewhere, however, they were a cause for celebration that here was a hope for the moribund British film industry, defiantly homosexual, defiantly artistic, and defiantly personal.

Jarman’s films were the antithesis of most British cinema, never mind the product from Hollywood, but there were those who feared his first venture into establishment-funded film-making (courtesy of the British Film Institute) would result in a sell-out costume drama. They needn’t have worried: Caravaggio is no conventional biopic but rather a meditation on the artist and his life, the conflicts therein, and the parallels to be found with the modern world and with Jarman himself as an artist.

The film plays out as a series of vignettes, beginning with Caravaggio on his death bed, and intermittently accompanied by a fruitily poetic voiceover, somewhere in tone between A Child’s Christmas in Wales and Notre-dame des fleurs. As a boy he is found painting on the streets and taught to read by a stern priest; as a man he is accompanied by a faithful assistant and becomes lovers with both a gypsy woman and her own lover, a bit of rough named Ranuccio. We see him most often at work in his studio, but also in more official settings, dealing with the church or attending an art party; most of the action plays out in pale white rooms, usually rather dirty, with props and set dressing pared down to the minimum (and therefore, to the essential). Few of the paintings are shown in a complete state, but their tableaux vivants are beautifully recreated and most of the pictures are presented at an evocatively immediate under-painted stage. Much of this was down to the £½million budget, but the facility of the Limehouse warehouse in which it was filmed, seven years of preparation on the part of Jarman and production designer Christopher Hobbes, and simply the enthusiasm and dedication of a young cast and crew resulted in a film of sparse integrity and idealistic art school charm.

Nigel Terry (Excaliber, Edward II) plays the adult Caravaggio, with sunken eyes and roguish face, beneath a broad-brimmed hat that makes him look like a western outlaw. His younger self is incarnated by rubber-lipped and curly-haired barrow-boy Dexter Fletcher (The Rachel Papers, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels), a perfect homoerotic specimen. Elsewhere the cast is stuffed with distinguished British stage talent, including Nigel Davenport and Michael Gough, and later-famous TV faces (Robbie Coltrane, Sean Bean); it also marks the first collaboration with Jarman’s future muse, Tilda Swinton, as the flame-haired gypsy. The cast is fine, if a little mannered in Jarman’s usual style; he was never much of an actor’s director. In fact, as beautiful as the photography is (by Gabriel Beristain) the vignettes often threaten to become as static as the reconstructed tableaux, and the breath of life is sometimes missing. That said, one of Jarman’s and Beristain’s aims was, appropriately enough, to fill the film with beautiful images (the windows of the Caravaggio’s studio in life and on set were covered in clear oilskin, creating a beautifully warm soft light) and refusing to succumb to the temptation of chiaroscuro-overload, the result is stunning to watch, a loving homage to the wonderful light in the paintings themselves.

The historical Caravaggio is something of a shadowy figure, and so the oblique approach to his life - a reimagining, almost - is likewise quite appropriate. Where the characters at times may seem opaque, the themes running through the film - the artistic process and its relationship with real (commercial, sexual) life; the implications of a street-bred artist using a prostitute as model for a beautiful painting of Mary Magdalene paid for by the church; the relationships between art and commerce and how they are little different today - are quite clear. This last is brought home specifically in a number of anachronisms - an art critic writes a coruscating review for an art magazine on a typewriter in his bath (incidentally evoking David’s Marat); Ranuccio works on a motorbike; waiters wear dinner jackets; everyone smokes cigarettes - but these are presented alongside perfect seventeenth-century strawberries, or a party with everyone in full period regalia (itself a dead-ringer for a contemporary art launch in fancy dress). Similarly clear is the relationship between the gay outsider Caravaggio and former painter Jarman (who takes a small cameo as a priest anointing some paint brushes); he spoke of wanting to create an Italy of the mind and manages both to conjure the street-level everyday of 300 years ago, and to merge it with the artistic climate of the 1980s. This approach extends to the film as a whole in its stylized presentation of significant elements of the artist’s biography, filtered through Jarman’s own experience as an artist, and rendered thereby rendered intensely personal both in identification and admiration. It is less a film of narrative or incident than a celebration of another’s artistic achievements, with beautiful design and photography and unbounded creative enthusiasm; as far as it may be from the norms of Hollywood cinema, it fully achieves the embodiment of the MGM logo itself - art for art’s sake.

image: hometown

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