Word: caravaggio
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...wounded, Hana is a guardian angel, listening like a doting mother to their plaints, caressing them like the chaste lovers they left back home. Setting Almasy up in a ruined monastery, she swathes his parchment skin and reads to him from his precious volume of Herodotus, while Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe), another veteran of the African campaign, urgently quizzes the patient on his mysterious wartime past...
...references to Dante, to Caravaggio (Pasolini once said that he wrote the script completely around the character of the real Ettore Garofolo, whom he saw one day carrying plates in a restaurant "just like a Caravaggio figure"), to Mantegna's "Cristo morto," to Vivaldi, whose religious music provides the backdrop for much of the film. This tension between Marxism and Catholicism, neorealism and symbolic references, is never overwhelming. It enhances each sequence, beautifying that which is most ugly, most tragic, or even most ordinary in a film determined to expose just these elements of Roman life...
Worse, there wasn't the protein in France to feed his imagination. It only existed in Rome: the presence of the recent masters from whom he learned so ! much, like Caravaggio and Annibale Carracci, and the dead ones to whom he owed even more, like Titian and Raphael; the enlightened patronage of such connoisseurs as Cassiano del Pozzo or Cardinal Barberini, for whom he painted his supreme utterance about Roman political virtue, The Death of Germanicus, 1628. Above all, there were the traces of ancient Rome, a buried organism whose disarrayed bones protruded everywhere: columns, capitals, broken herms, arches, battle...
...theater isn't realist, like Caravaggio's, but it is based on a codification of reality, a formal, elevated representation of passion and thought. In this he was absolutely French -- the contemporary of Pierre Corneille, whose tragedies revolved around ideas of free will, exemplary virtue and conflicts between desire and duty, enacted by characters from a classical past who spoke ardently and directly to a 17th century audience. Rome made Poussin; but after him, Rome could no longer condescend to Paris. By the time of his death, he had helped create an irreversible shift in the cultural balance of Europe...
Besides the voice of Jarman, those of three talented actors and frequent Jarman collaborators are heard. Nigel Terry and Tilda Swinton (of Orlando fame) worked with the director in "Caravaggio," "Edward II" and "Wittgenstein." John Quentin appeared in the latter. The impressive sound-track features, among others, the musician and producer Brian...