Lights and shadows of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, born in Lombardy at the end of the sixteenth century and moved to Rome for love of art. Affected by a proud and irascible character, as well as by a form of malaria that undermines him for almost all his life, Michele experiences and records first the cruelty of hunger, brawls in brothels, public hangings of the eternal city and only later the magnanimity of Cardinal Del Monte, enlightened ecclesiastic, close to the noblewoman Costanza Corona (Elena Sofia Ricci), who in turn protects and favors the painter since childhood.
The passion for Fillide (Claire Keim), a courtesan, however, leads him to clash with his protector Ranuccio Tomassoni (Maurizio Donadoni), forcing him first to jail and then to escape for murder, despite the success that his works begin to get every court and patron.
While his friends intercede with the Pope to get him the grace of forgiveness, Michele leaves Naples and then Malta to land in Sicily, welcomed by his close friend, Mario Minniti (Paolo Briguglia). Ready to return to Rome with the paintings for the Holy Father, he is instead arrested by mistake in the port of Palo, the tragic end of his life.
Caravaggio is a work which avoids the aesthetic drift and the didactic pamphlet, and enjoys the illustrious collaboration of Vittorio Storaro, “author of photography”, three times Oscar winner, who owes the painter a debt of gratitude, having devoted himself to the study of light and color for his love.
Directed by Angelo Longoni, screenplay by James Carrington and Andrea Purgatori and music by another Oscar winner, Luis Bacalov (Il Postino), the film starts from the name of accursed artist that surrounds the myth of the protagonist to make ambivalence and contradiction its signature. An omnivorous lover who is incapable of bonding, a sensitive artist who is also a wrathful man, a firm believer in the Holy Scriptures as much as in the matter of reality even in its most grim aspects, Caravaggio is admired for his talent and detested because he paints the saints with the faces of the outcasts, the madonnas with the somatic features of prostitutes.
At the center of the story, the impossibility of reconciling his human nature, carnal and unstable, with the arrogance of his genius. At the center of the form, the power of light, which alters every form that invests, gives birth to figures from darkness, allows the existence of cinema itself.
Marianna Cappi
Source
Genre: drama – historical
Cast
Alessio Boni: Caravaggio
Claire Keim: Fillide Melandroni
Jordi Mollà: Francesco Maria Bourbon del Monte Santa Maria
Paolo Briguglia: Mario Minniti
Benjamin Sadler: Onorio Longhi
Elena Sofia Ricci: Costanza Colonna
Sarah Felberbaum: Lena
Ruben Rigillo: Fabrizio Colonna
Luis Bacalov soundtrack
