Caravaggio

<p><i>Caravaggio</i> (1986) Derek Jarman's portrait of the Italian Baroque artist shows the painter at work with models drawn from Rome's homeless and prostitutes and his relationship with two very different lovers: Ranuccio played by Sean Bean and Lena played by Tilda Swinton. It is probably the closest Derek Jarman came to a mainstream film. And yet the film is a uniquely complex and lucid treatment of Jarman's major concerns: violence history homosexuality and the relation between film and painting. In particular according to Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit <i>Caravaggio</i> is unlike Jarman's other work in avoiding a sentimentalising of gay relationships and in making no neat distinction between the exercise and the suffering of violence. <p/>Film-making involves a coercive power which for Bersani and Dutoit Jarman may without admitting it to himself have found deeply seductive. But in <i>Caravaggio</i> this power is renounced and the result is Jarman's most profound unsettling and astonishing reflection on sexuality and identity.</p>