“My Dirty Caravaggio is a new reality movie without the polished scenes” – Corriere.it

“In the world of cinema they asked me, but why do you take Riccardo Scamarcio as Caravaggio? He is unpleasant, he has certain attitudes … But I answered why was Caravaggio sympathetic? That is why she was chosen,” says Michele Placido.

They are moonless nights among the narrow and dangerous alleys. A bar in dim light, crossed by blades of light cut by a razor. It really looks like his painting. It’s Film Festival Day Caravaggio’s shadow (on November 3 vs. 01). Naples, 1609. Against the backdrop of a theater that possesses the splendor and misery of the Baroque era, constant battles take place in the slums. blood daggers “I wanted a sloppy movie, new realism, and the scenes that were live and unpainted,” Placido says.

Then he appears, the painter who paints the truth: the pain of humanity, the wretch, the thieves and prostitutes, the poor anointed ones, his street children saints, the Pasolini before the Pasolini. He was a mystic, as I see in his paintings beggar, villages. Today he will be a photojournalist.” A new world has broken out that put people before the mighty. Then Rome, and consequently the priests, the aristocrats, “in the infamous bustle of life.” Scamarcio sees the painter as “a rock star in painting, it reminds me of the cursed life of Elvis Presley.”

He says he has points in common: «We have come to Rome, touched by genuine passions. I saw his energy and fever in Michele Placido’s eyes. I tried to return it.

The muse depicting Madonna is Lena, a prostitute, Michela Ramazzotti. He lives like a stray dog, a hero in getting into trouble, waiting for a papal pardon that overturns beheading for murder. His fate is in the hands of the Marquis, Costanza Colonna, a widow of lewd behavior, who is her protector love relationship With the great painter Isabelle Hubert: «Defining himself in his rebellion and aggression, he was a Shakespearean figure: good, evil, justice. But there is also Dostoevsky in the legitimacy of the rebellion.” In the cast we also find his daughter Lolita Schama: it is Anna Bianchini, a courtesan with auburn hair.

In a creative and personal story, Placido features androgynous Cardinal Del Monte, the art collector who always protected the painter: “His art was in opposition because it made us think, and awakened consciences.”

The director imagines that Pope Paul V, in order to study that daredevil, entrusted himself to a messenger, Louis Garrel, a servant of authority who once said to himself: “He is a fundamentalist priest. There is a contrast between the beauty of those paintings and the myths of violence that flourished around him.”

He shows himself an outlet to the pictorial talent of Artemisia Gentileschi and to that of the man who depicts himself on Medusa’s head shield with his eyes wide open, as if coming out of their sockets. It is that servant who is the shadow of the title, the one who searches for the impulsive and rebellious anarchist artist. Garrel is an injection of brilliance: “We are all reactionary, like the shadow. In the face of the avant-garde, social and artistic; motivated we say no, things don’t happen that way, before it is better…Shadow is fascism and conformity that arises out of fear. I asked myself: What is fascism about me? I have many things. And the shadows swayed like this.”

Roman churches did not authorize the shooting. Placido: “I sent the script, they gave it back to me. So he turned to the Neapolitan churches, the twin of the Romanesque church, run by private associations.”

The soundtrack is by Placido’s wife (the only thing “unforgivable”: for a movie about beauty, he showed up wearing short German stockings!). Federica Luna Vincenti is also a producer: the film cost 14 million. It is the last link to many films about Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio: the Biography in 1941 with Amedeo Nazari who said: “My career begins today”; TV series with Alessio Boni; The hypnotic gaze of Derek German between Symbolism and Surrealism, The Silver Bear at the 1986 Berlinale; Artistic film on the sky with the voice of Manuel Agnelli.

Caravaggio was mystical and bodily. His homosexuality is a marginal issue. Instead, he liked women, who are here bold, never submissive, free, and passionate. With Isabelle Hubert, it can only be so.

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