Michele Placido went out to chiaroscuro – Newspaper Kommersant No. 55 (7500) of 03/31/2023

The Shadow of Caravaggio by Michele Placido was released. Neat, despite the rebel hero, the biographical drama is quite suitable for the first acquaintance with the life and work of the great artist, but the authors failed to convey his high madness and passion on the screen, believes Yulia Shagelman.

The Shadow of Caravaggio opens, as a self-respecting biopic should, with an explanatory caption. He informs the audience that in 1609 the artist Michelangelo Merisi, nicknamed Caravaggio (Riccardo Scamarchio), accused of murdering a certain Ranuccio Tomassoni (Brenno Placido, the handsome son of the director), fled from Rome to Naples, where, using the patronage of the noble Colonna family, he remained wait for a papal pardon. The dates are slightly confused: in reality, Caravaggio arrived in Naples earlier, and in 1609 he was already in Sicily, but we will make allowances for the fact that we are not reading an encyclopedic article, but watching a work of art. And as it has become in recent years, it aims to be less of a traditional biopic than a fantasy based on the life of a great man, using the latter as an excuse to present no less great ideas. Since our hero is Caravaggio, we are, of course, talking about love and death, light and shadow, genius and villainy, freedom and (unsuccessful) attempts to limit it.

At the same time, Michele Placido himself and his two co-authors of the script, Sandro Petraglia and Fidel Signorile, are far from being free and uninhibited in creative self-expression as the subject of their research, or, say, like Derek Jarman, who shot his Caravaggio in 1986. The British director, without much preamble, threw the viewer into the thick of an anachronistic guignol, where the artist’s models smoked cigarettes and wore hats folded from newspaper, his enemies typed their denunciations on typewriters, and he himself looked more like a recklessly burning rock and roll star (now such techniques have already become commonplace, but 37 years ago it was bold and fresh).

In The Shadow of Caravaggio, all the details are quite historical: every lace collar, corset lacing, codpiece and cardinal cap is in its place, and the streets of Rome and Naples are smeared with dirt corresponding to the era. The process of creating great canvases is shown, as is usually done in biopics: Caravaggio takes beggars and prostitutes around the room, changes his white dress to red, throws a shawl over someone’s shoulders, brings a live horse to the workshop – and here we have “The Crucifixion of St. Peter ”, “Conversion of Saul” or “Assumption of the Virgin”. At the same time, cinematographer Michele D’Attanasio (who worked, for example, on the popular TV series Gomorrah) honestly tries to stylize the picture under Caravaggi’s chiaroscuro, and in some places he even succeeds.

For the convenience of the viewers and in order to make the presentation of the facts of Caravaggio’s biography look more or less organic, the authors place the whole story in the frame of an investigation, which, on the instructions of the Holy See, is led by an inquisitor in black, who calls himself the Shadow (Louis Garrel). While the artist is hiding in Naples, where, however, he almost immediately manages to run into new troubles, Shadow rewinds the last few years before the murder and escape, trying to establish whether he is worthy of pardon or the reputation of a brawler-voluptuous sodomite is true, and his paintings in actually offend the feelings of believers. In the process, he interrogates Caravaggio’s patrons – the Marchesa Colonna (Isabelle Huppert), the cardinals del Monte (Michele Placido himself) and Scipione Borghese (Gianluca Gobbi), his student Artemisia Gentileschi (Lea Gavino), his rival, the mannerist artist Giovanni Baglione (Vinicio Marchioni). ), as well as numerous homeless people, beggars and street whores who served, to great public indignation, as models for his canvases. In flashbacks, orgies, fights and duels alternate like clockwork with philosophical conversations – for example, with Giordano Bruno himself (Gianfranco Gallo), whom Caravaggio meets in prison during his next term – and with outbursts of divine inspiration.

Alas, inspiration is what the film desperately lacks, despite all the efforts of the authors, and perhaps precisely because they are trying too hard, staging the plots of Caravaggio’s paintings and drawing whipping scars on the backs of actresses playing prostitutes. The furious desire of the artist for the highest truth growing from the basest street rubbish, the equally furious attempts of those in power to hide this truth – the message is clear and, moreover, it is repeatedly spoken out, but it remains too formal, not coming from the heart, more in the spirit of Baglione than Caravaggio.