Caravaggio, Face to Face

Poses and folds in Caravaggio

Derek Jarman's Caravaggio, from 1986, is a meditation on the artist and his work. It is not a narrative bio-pic, but it is, if accepted on its own terms, a fitfully arresting art film. A series of vignettes unfold in flashback after we meet the dying Caravaggio being attended by his mute servant. The plot is a fanciful, bare-bones rendering of the tortured artist's life: he finds a patron in Cardinal Del Monte, portrayed by Michael Gough, but gets caught up in a tragic love triangle with Tilda Swinton and Sean Bean. The plot, while not entirely historically accurate, does show how the artist mingled with both high and low society, often using rent boys and girls as models. Most of the film has Caravaggio dashing off a masterpiece while his companions pose and party on.

I am a big Caravaggio fan and have read more about his life and work than is perhaps recommendable. I may be harder to please than most regarding works about the master. I wholeheartedly recommend two books concerning Caravaggio: Peter Robb's half biographical, half speculative M: The Man Who Became Caravaggio and Alvaro Enrigue's phantasmagoric novel Sudden Death. Both are superb. Jarman's conception of the artist doesn't jibe with mine. Nigel Terry is a fine and sensitive actor, but he is too fine and sensitive to play Caravaggio. Caravaggio was a lout, forever getting into drunken scrapes. A young Oliver Reed would have been ideal casting. Jarman pictures Caravaggio as a champion of the downtrodden and there is truth to this notion. However, I think Jarman errs by eliding aspects of Caravaggio's personality. He is portrayed generously taking a mute out of charity as his assistant.  Their relationship is sweet, but that is the problem with the film: its Caravaggio is more sweet than transgressive. Caravaggio's actual model and companion, Cecco (aka Francesco Boneri, aka Cecco del Caravaggio), is most vividly displayed in Caravaggio's own Amor Vincit Omnia. The element of pederasty might have been too transgressive for Jarman to tackle.

Sandy Powell's costumes are splendid, as is Simon Fisher-Turner's music. Jarman was reacting against the bombastic Hollywood soundtracks of the day, wanting to create "an area of silence amid the hubbub of modern entertainment." Here, and especially in Blue, he succeeded. Sean Bean and Tilda Swinton are also assets to the film. Swinton has an especially nice moment as a hardened whore driven to rapture by being able to wear an expensive frock. She would never look as joyous and youthful again. Still, Jarman's awkwardness in his handling of group scenes, when his actors are not posing on their marks, marks him as a minor director. This was driven home to me watching Face to Face, Ingmar Bergman's 1976 effort. Bergman's tableaus are every bit as artificial as Jarman's, but, because of his dramatic and cinematic rigor, they throb with lived in intensity. When Erland Josephson comforts Liv Ullmann in bed, the sheets and blankets create intense folds that highlight the intimacy of a scene, like a Pieta. Jarman, aping Caravaggio's baroque detail, uses fabric similarly, but the effect is self-conscious and superficial.

This is not to say that Face to Face is a flawless masterpiece, but it is one of the better films he made after the spasmodic breakthrough of Persona in 1966. Bergman could never do mod, so a gay party scene early on falls flat. The intensity of Ullman's performance transcends any clunky moments. Portraying a woman losing her grip on sanity as dark visions erupt from her unconscious, Ullmann is scarifying in her vulnerability. An abortive rape hurtles her into a downward spiral that resonates even more today in a world rife with PTSD.   This is Ullmann best performance because it is her least vain and self-aggrandizing one. When her character, recovering from a suicide attempt, is chided by her daughter for her insensitivity, Ullmann's ruefully acceptant reaction not only embodies her character's masochism, but underlines Bergman's notion of family dynamics as an endless cycle of abuse and recrimination.

If anything, I find Bergman's "happy" ending to be too pat. Ullmann's character recovers far too easily from her malady after a dubiously cathartic session. Nevertheless, there is much to appreciate here. Most of Face to Face is filmed in two shots with a fixed camera. Pans are used to evoke the mental decomposition of Ullmann's character, most memorably a POV shot of Ullmann's room as she slips into unconsciousness; which Woody Allen echoed in Interiors. Face to Face could very well have been entitled Interiors. There are a few establishing exterior shots, but the majority of the film is indoors. Evan the expanse of Ullmann's unconscious seems cramped in Face to Face.

Cramped quarters in Face to Face