Sin Review: The Madness and Melancholy of Michelangelo Sin Review: The Madness and Melancholy of Michelangelo
Andrei Konchalovsky s handsomely lensed film about the great Italian artist grapples with how to create divine works amid earthly travails.
Manuel Betancourt, provided by
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Director: Andrei Konchalovsky
With: Alberto Testone, Jakob Diehl, Francesco Gaudiello, Federico Vanni, Glenn Blackhall, Orso Maria Guerrini, Anita Pititto. (Italian dialogue)
Running time: Running time: 134 MIN.
To say “Sin” is about Michelangelo is much too reductive. Rather than offering up a definitive portrait of the Italian artist, Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky has crafted instead He’s all those things and yet defined by none of them. It’s telling that “Sin” doesn’t actually spend much time with Michelangelo creating, less interested as it is in what makes a great artist than in the material conditions that shape and inspire one.
2/19/2021
Arriving in the U.S. almost simultaneously with his raved-about release
Sin centers on another artist whose grand projects often competed with each other: Michelangelo, whose talents were demanded by one pope even as he had years to go on a job for that man s predecessor.
A beautiful but decidedly unromantic look at artistic drive, the Italian/Russian production zeroes in on the great man s demons without, as art-biographical cliches usually have it, crediting them for his genius. A captivating lead performance and a truly massive central metaphor make it a memorable arthouse film, even if the arthouses in this case (from Film Forum to Austin Film Society to Laemmle in L.A.) are all virtual.
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Neither agonizing nor ecstatic, but solidly cinematic, Andrei Konchalovsky’s Michelangelo biopic “Sin” sees the veteran Russian filmmaker tackling the mystery of genius with what might be described as sumptuous grit. It’s a Renaissance-era recreation that looks both lavish and hard, bracketed in a sense by the infinite gaze from the Italian alps at one extreme and at the other, the everyday dodge in Florentine or Roman streets of emptied waste buckets; in between, amidst popes and peasants, one man made timeless art. But while the visceral pull of “Sin” commands the attention, it never exactly fuses its various strands of conflict into a cohesive vision of the irascible artist’s unique plight.