"Caravaggio" - Dir. Derek Jarman, 1986, UK | Free Film (Rated M)

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Winner of the Silver Bear at the Protected content International Film Festival, Jarman’s celebrated biopic stars Tilda Swinton in her debut film performance.

‘I’m stuck with this project like an iron lung,’ Jarman despaired at his attempts to finance a portrait of the great Renaissance painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. Seven years and seventeen script rewrites later, he produced this extraordinary meditation on ‘deviant’ sexuality, criminality and art. Notorious for his love of street fights, Caravaggio died tragically a decade after coming to prominence in Rome. Drawn to the artist’s rebellious spirit, Jarman’s biopic proceeds from the idea that everything written about the troubled painter was fiction, and that the only reputable sources were the Roman police reports of the time and the paintings themselves. The film unfolds in flashbacks, detailing a love triangle between Caravaggio, his model muse Ranuccio, and Ranuccio’s lover Lena. Key paintings are brought to life in lush tableaux that replicate the atmosphere of the artist’s studio. Once again, the film’s set design delights in anachronism, with 16th-century Romans seen smoking cigarettes, riding motorbikes, and cruising bars lit by electric light.