Italiano
L’ombra di Caravaggio by Michele Placido, distributed by 01 Distribution, will be released in Italian cinemas on Thursday, November 3rd, 2022. The film was presented in the section Grand Public of the 17th Rome Film Fest.
L’OMBRA DI CARAVAGGIO
Director
Michele Placido
Nations
Italy
Year
2022
Duration
118′
Cast
Riccardo Scamarcio
Louis Garrel
Isabelle Huppert
Micaela Ramazzotti
Mario Molinari (Tedua)
Vinicio Marchioni
Italy in the year 1600. Michelangelo Merisi is a rebel artist who balks at the rules laid down by the Council of Trent on religious art. Pope Paul V hires a secret agent at the Vatican to investigate Merisi, to decide whether the artist should receive a pardon annulling his death sentence for killing a romantic rival in a duel. ‘The Shadow’ is the agent’s moniker; he now holds the life, and death, of a genius in his hands.
COMMENTARY
Now on his 14th film as a director, Michele Placido has gone back to an idea he had in 1968, when, newly arrived in Rome, he attended the Academy of Dramatic Arts. In order to tell the story of Michelangelo Merisi (aka Caravaggio) from a fresh viewpoint, Placido invents a character, The Shadow (Louis Garrel): an investigator who spies on the painter on Pope Paul V’s orders, to size up his orthodoxy. Placido’s Caravaggio is not only a rockstar before his time and an artiste maudit; he’s a full-blown rebel against the powers that be, who reject the truth that is his prime concern – the truth that the film seeks as well, reconstructing a squalid past, far from the glossed-over view, to recreate the real earthly dimension of the artist and his times, carnal and painful as that was. The quest for authenticity emerges clearly from the choice of locations, the historical reconstructions of the sets, the costumes, and also the sophisticated techniques used to reproduce famous artworks, neither rough copies nor one-dimensional photographs.
MICHELE PLACIDO
Born in 1946, Michele Placido started out as an actor in the 1970s, working with stage directors Ronconi, Strehler, and Patroni Griffi, and filmmakers Comencini, Monicelli, Bellocchio, and the Taviani brothers. He rose to fame in the ‘80s, for the TV series La piovra. He acted in films by Rosi, Ferreri, Amelio, Martone, Moretti, and Tornatore. Placido helmed his first film, Tomato, in 1990, followed by many others, such as Ordinary Hero (special David), Crime Novel (eight Davids and five Silver Ribbons), and 7 Minutes (special Silver Ribbon).
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
Caravaggio was close to the pauperist wing of the Church, which sought to return to the values of the Gospels. The studio where he produced his masterpieces saw a steady stream of shopkeepers, prostitutes, nobles, and prelates who doubled as art collectors. That studio reflected its own time but resembled a workshop from our own, revolving around an artist straining towards the future, obsessed with describing, in his paintings, a view of religion that was utterly new and revolutionary, in which the Bible stories are depicted by recruiting people from the streets: beggars, whores, and thieves, in a sort of Neorealism very much ahead of its time
