This film is a fictionalized biography of Baroque painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Nigel Terry), the 16th-century artist. It explores the love triangle of Caravaggio, Lena (Tilda Swinton), and Ranuccio (Sean Bean) and dwells upon Caravaggio's use of street people, drunks, and prostitutes as models for his dark and dimly lit paintings. The movie begins with Caravaggio as a youth (Dexter Fletcher) who charges for everything he sells, whether it's his paintings or his body. All gay and bisexual characters live life to the hilt. There are many anachronisms, such as Caravaggio's use of contemporary dress for his Biblical figures, a bar lit with electric lights, and a character using an electronic calculator. Caravaggio is presented as one of the founders of the chiaroscuro technique, which uses selective light to illuminate form in contrast to the deep shadows around it. His genius made him a legend, and the film suggests that the legend ultimately eclipsed his enormous talent. After Ranuccio has stabbed him in a fight, Caravaggio tells his mute servant Jerusaleme (Spencer Leigh): "All art is against lived experience. How can you compare flesh and blood with oil, ground pigment?" Lying on his deathbed, delirious with fever, Caravaggio recalls his life, loves, and obsessions. A monk tries to force a crucifix into Caravaggio's hands, but he uses his last strength to hurl it away.
"Caravaggio" was shot entirely at Limehouse Studios, in the central London dockyards on the Thames River. It is director Derek Jarman's most ambitious, popular, and acclaimed film, typical of his style, one of his greatest works, and features an engrossing plot. It took eight long frustrating years before he could finally bring it to the screen. The dialogue is in unrhymed verse, and Jarman did not create a Hollywood reproduction of Caravaggio's world, only "an Italy of the mind." Simon Fisher-Turner composed the original music, and Derek Jarman wrote the script from a story by Nicholas Ward Jackson.
