Caravaggio's Shadow

The movie is the story of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio who was an Italian painter in the 16th century, through the eyes of the Pope's investigator. He was known for painting "what he saw", some kind of reality that he wanted close to the divine, which was of course not ok with the Catholic Church. Within his paintings, you could see famous prostitutes, hoboes, represented as saints, such as Mary or St Peter. His life has multiple legends around it, he was known to have sexual relationships with both males and females, while painting for the Church, and his competitors tried to destroy him for that. He had to flee Rome after killing (accidentally?) someone and lived in Naples, Sicily, Malta, etc. The story of the movie is a bit long, but this is not why you should see this movie. The whole movie is staged as a painting, with that kind of atmosphere that you get from 16th century Italian paintings. Would I watch it again? No, but I am happy I watched it.

The hypocrisy of key Church figures who condemn the sensuality of the painter, all the while competing to hoard his art seems bizarre, the figure of Caravaggio becomes an attractive and sympathetic revolutionary hero in a secular era. While his animalistic rutting grosses me out he gets the best lines. The investigator who travels around interviewing witnesses is so intent on his task he becomes one-dimensional. But the film suffers from such poor narrative construction that it becomes tedious and repetitive, gradually dulling my interest. If the powerful originality of the artist's output were shown more clearly I would have found it more enjoyable.

Caravaggio's Shadow is a fever dream of a film, vividly photographed and convincingly played by an (unsurprisingly) handsome Italian cast.

There's plenty of melodrama, but it's an Italian period piece; anything less would have felt restrained.

At the heart of it is an irresolvable contradiction: the Vatican and papacy are the immensely rich and powerful core of Catholicism, but Catholicism is anchored by the teachings of Jesus, friend of the poor, the outcast and the desperate. What happens when the Vatican's most talented painter - a devout genius - uses the poor, the disgraced, and the outcasts of society as his subjects in seeking the truth of scripture?

Expect plenty of debauchery, plenty of on-location renaissance architecture, some intrigue, and even some swashbuckling swordfighting.

Worth your time.

L'Ombra di Caravaggio promises a fiery portrait of a tortured genius and instead delivers two hours of overwrought mood lighting, erratic time jumps, and enough theatrical whispering to power an entire semester at drama school.

The film adopts the now-inescapable "non-linear" structure, which in this case means the plot zigzags like a drunk fencing master. Sure they toss in a few time markers, but stylistically it's all one long, indistinguishable swirl of tormented men in cloaks.

Our anti-hero Caravaggio is painted (pardon the pun) as your typical Renaissance bad boy: rebellious, tortured, bisexual, brooding, but also - plot twist! - a devout Catholic. Because nothing screams "believable complexity" like orgies one minute and confessions the next. He's supposed to feel radical, but ends up as a kind of art-school Jesus with eyeliner.

Enter "Ombra," the Church's enforcer and a villain so laughably named it's amazing no one bursts out laughing when he introduces himself. Shadow, really? Why not just call him "Father Oppression" and be done with it? He spends most of the film lurking in corners and embodying the Vatican's greatest hits: repression, judgment, and fabulous robes.

As far as the orgies are concerned, we didn't need quite so many scenes of candlelit debauchery, complete with bored courtesans, snarling pigs, and pouting boys.

To pad things out between the sex and the brooding, the film indulges in lavish re-creations of Caravaggio's paintings, which are admittedly striking - if you enjoy watching actors pose like a diorama in a museum gift shop. At times, it feels less like a biopic and more like an over-budgeted PowerPoint presentation on Baroque composition.

And then there's the ending. Since history has left Caravaggio's death ambiguous, the filmmakers go full fan-fiction and cook up a finale that manages to be both absurd and deeply unsatisfying. One almost expects him to ascend into a ray of divine light, paintbrush in hand.

On the plus side the lighting is gorgeous. Every scene looks like it's been lit by angels and Instagram filters. But beautiful visuals can only carry you so far when the script feels like a Gregorian soap opera.

A lot is not known about Caravaggio's life, but a lot is. It is understandable and legitimate that a film like this fills in the unknown gaps. The fact that it twists, falsifies and rewrites the known things is unworthy of a biography.

I am anything but a friend of the Catholic Church and even less of the church leaders. But the way he was portrayed here in a one-sided way as a victim of the church, whose representatives were Caravaggio's most zealous supporters, is infamous. "The Death of Mary" has nothing to do with being rejected by a pope; the monks who commissioned it did that themselves. Because Caravaggio did not paint in accordance with the commission. And the painting was not saved by Rubens, who is said to have bought it in Rome according to the film, but by Ferdinando Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, the year after it was completed. Or the questioning of Artemisia Gentileschi. Caravaggio probably didn't even know her, even if her father did.

And these inaccuracies, distortions and falsifications run through the entire film, which has only one goal: to save the artist's honor. But he doesn't need to be saved. His art speaks for itself, as does his raw, unbridled character, which borders on brutality. Presenting the church as his murderer is an affront to all the church's real victims.

So an honorable attempt becomes a historically useless piece of work that doesn't bring you any closer to the artist's work. His apotheotic classification as a three-eyed man among the blind is tiring early on in the film.