People tend to think that history is immutable, that there is something called reality. Reality is what interests me – that image of reality in Caravaggio. Why is a Ken Loach film more real than a Ken Russell film? And why is Italian neorealism more real than Michael Powell’s cinema? For me, the answer is that they are not.” In light of a new film about Caravaggio, these words by Derek Jarman lend themselves to being quoted. Words from the director of the most considered work of cinema about the Italian painter, whose title is simply: Caravaggio (1986). And why this issue of realism (which permeates art)? Because it applies to the spirit of Caravaggio’s Shadow, by Michele Placido, also an approach that does not respect historical treasures, which celebrates the angle of the director. Understand: if Jarman wanted to extract their queer and blasphemous dimension from the artist’s biography and painting, Placido, although in a lesser tone, is on the same side of the free portrait, myth and imagination supported by available studies. Reality is whatever the director wants.
Anyway, I didn’t bring to mind Jarman’s film to compare or “shadow” it. L’Ombra di Caravaggio, rather to reflect the dialogue between the modernity of cinema and the baroque painter who perhaps had the most influence, and continues to have, on the work of cinematographers. It is no coincidence that Caravaggio’s light is talked about in relation to everything and anything, be it the so-called great cinema (Apocalypse Now and the scene with Marlon Brando’s naked head drawn by shadow, some films by Albert Serra, etc.), be it any film that highlights the chiaroscuro technique as a way of producing a pictorial impression, that is, a deliberate evocation of painting.
And it is not because it is not at the level of great cinema that this work by Michele Placido fails to rehearse this visual approach – it does so, in fact, without exaggerating the tempting effect of the vivid paintings, referring to the place of fictional honesty. Placido was clearly interested in the carnal man, who goes by the name of Michelangelo Merisi (Caravaggio was his artistic name), whose manifestations of desire, life among the marginalized and, above all, the search for the violence inherent in bodies, offered art the awareness that any representation of the sacred can only come from humans, in their least privileged condition.
In this context, Riccardo Scamarcio is a more than fair choice to take on the role of Caravaggio, an actor who responds to the call of physical vigor, intensity of presence, inner turmoil and chaos of the flesh, reproducing the “picture” of a a vaguely documented existence that raises a lively imagination.
Placido’s film plays with this, focusing precisely on the patterns of a life that does not conform to the terms of the Church (regardless of the time; but we are in Italy in 1610), appearing here the figure of an investigator of the services Vatican secrets, Ombra/ “Shadow” (Louis Garrel), who investigates the licentious path of the painter accused of murder, in order to support the decision for or against a death sentence.
