Review: Sin Gives Vibrant Expression to the Paradox of Michelangelo’s Art

Andrei Konchalovsky’s film is fascinated with the creation of great art in the midst of socio-political turmoil.

Sin
Photo: Corinth Films

In its fascination with the creation of great art in the midst of socio-political turmoil, Sin finds Andrei Konchalovsky tending to a familiar preoccupation within his body of work. More than five decades ago, he co-wrote Andrei Rublev, which found in artistic genius an expression of the divine that transcends the violence and depravity accompanying the Tatar invasions of Russia. Through its depiction of a fraught process of creation, Sin, like Andrei Tarkovsky’s classic, addresses the Christian paradox of humanity being suspended between heaven and earth, of our being made in the image of God but consigned to a fallen and finite life. Rather than medieval Russia, though, Sin takes us to the height of the Italian Renaissance, excerpting a chapter from the life of Michelangelo (Alberto Testone) that saw him struggling against limited resources, the shifting political winds, and his own obsessive perfectionism.

When the film opens, Michelangelo is already well established as Italy’s foremost sculptor, addressed by everyone from his workshop laborers to the Pope and his vassals as “maestro.” The balance of power in the Vatican is shifting, though, from the Della Rovere family that holds the papal office and Michelangelo’s loyalty to the Medicis. While both clans see the papacy primarily as a seat of worldly power rather than holy duty, Konchalovsky portrays the Medicis in particular as a cynical, corrupt network of aristocrats that one could easily compare to mobsters—or, with only a bit more extrapolation, to capitalists. It’s worth speculating about the possible significance this story holds for Konchalovsky as an octogenarian who’s made films both for an outwardly stable but deeply corrupt and morally compromised Soviet state and for the even crasser neoliberal oligarchy that succeeded it.

Whatever the allegorical dimension of Michelangelo’s story as told here, it doesn’t divert Konchalovsky from the tactile realities, the grit and grime, of life in 16th-century cities. In the first half, Michelangelo divides his time between his native Florence, where his father (Adriano Chiaramida) and brothers (Roberto Serpi and Alessandro Pezzali) take advantage of his generosity with the coin brought in by his commissions from the Vatican, and the seat of power in and around Rome. Not unlike the unkempt Michelangelo himself, the cities are ragged and filthy; twice in the film our main character barely avoids being doused by the contents of a chamber pot chucked out of a second-floor window into the street.

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The film’s Renaissance Italy stands in stark contrast to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s equally vivid but significantly more lively depiction of the era in The Decameron. It’s a comparison that Konchalovsky invites in a scene where Michelangelo rages at his apprentice, Peppe (Jakob Diehl), when the latter makes a passing reference to Giovanni Boccaccio’s irreverent “human comedy.” The devout Divine Comedy is much more Michelangelo’s speed; at one point he suggests that Dante Alighieri is the only Italian artist in his league. And the film aligns us with a kind of dualistic worldview that contrasts the fallen, worldly world and the higher sphere represented, if not by God, then by art. This is expressed perhaps a bit too literally in a scene that finds Michelangelo wandering in a quasi-fugue state through early-morning Rome, observing (or perhaps hallucinating) his own David sculpture at a crossroads, flanked in the background by a publicly hanged man dangling from the battlements of a nearby fortress.

With his rugged features and almost Klaus Kinsky-esque capacity to turn rapidly from sheepish deference to narcissistic ranting, Testone brings a sullen intensity to his role that’s well suited to Sin’s Herzogian take on the genius as madman-outcast. Much of the film’s second half concerns itself with Michelangelo’s fool’s errand, adopted at least in part to show up his frenemy Sansovino (Federico Vanni), to transport an monstrous hunk of marble down a mountainside in Carrara (here, the shades of Fitzcarraldo cannot be unintentional). Also dogged by the claims on his loyalty from both the Della Rovere and Medici clans, the man’s drive to create becomes stymied by the impediments of the physical world, in the form of an immovable slice of mountainside and an equally intractable climate of political corruption.

Here again it’s hard not to see Konchalovsky’s five-decade film career as an informative intertext. Rather than on the product of the creative process, Sin focuses tightly on craft and economics, and it’s easy enough to see parallels with the filmmaker’s perpetual struggle for funding, as well as with the impossible full reconciliation of artistic intent with the patronages and systems of exchange that are necessary to bring it into being. When Michelangelo heads off to Pietrasanta in northwestern Italy for a new source of marble in the final half-hour of the film, it feels like a location scouting trip; when he disappears from public life and spends days locked in his room in Florence, it’s like he’s hiding in his trailer. If sculpting has been described as a struggle against its raw material, Konchalovsky takes this as a metaphor for the paradox of great art, which seems to exist both because of and despite the world.

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Score: 
 Cast: Alberto Testone, Jakob Diehl, Adriano Chiaramida, Massimo De Francovich, Federico Vanni, Roberto Serpi, Alessandro Pezzali, Yulia Visotskaya  Director: Andrei Konchalovsky  Screenwriter: Andrei Konchalovsky, Elena Kiseleva  Distributor: Corinth Films  Running Time: 134 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2019  Buy: Video

Pat Brown

Pat Brown teaches Film Studies and American Studies in Germany. His writing on film and media has appeared in various scholarly journals and critical anthologies.

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