Andrei Konchalovsky's Sin is showing on MUBI starting June 18, 2021 in the United States.
Not once does Michelangelo pick up a brush—or a chisel—in Andrei Konchalovsky’s Sin. Like the Russian icon painter in Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, which Konchalovsky co-wrote over five decades ago, the artist is never captured at work and is instead plunged into a war-stricken wasteland, a 16th century Italy that feels, looks, and probably smells like a pestilential nightmare straight out of Dante’s Inferno. There are wars, murders, plots, crooked aristocrats and ungrateful relatives; early on, Alberto Testone’s Michelangelo staggers into Florence’s Piazza della Signoria to see his monumental David preside over a swamp of corpses and severed heads. Time and again, the genius casts his eyes skyward, searching for someone who’ll only show up in the film’s closing shot. There’s a biblical quality to his helplessness, a crisis that’s both creative and spiritual, and swells Sin into a Christ-like tale: the Passion According to Michelangelo.
Films about the Italian Renaissance master abound; to my knowledge, one of the earliest was Curt Oertel’s 1940 Michelangelo: Das Leben Eines Titanen, re-edited by Robert J. Flaherty and Richard Lyford after the war as The Titan: Story of Michelangelo (1950). It’s an art documentary that feels decades ahead of its time. With mobile camera movements and skillful lighting, not only does it retain the plasticity of Michelangelo’s marbles, it also brings them to life to an extent other films have since strived and failed to match. (As a double bill, I watched it together with Emanuele Imbucci’s 2018 Michelangelo—Endless, and the differences were startling: where The Titan comes close to grasping something of those creations’ awe-inspiring grandeur—Michelangelo’s own terribilità—Imbucci’s flashy and bombastic docudrama seemed to turn the same artworks into car commercials). To boot, Flaherty and Lyford told their story without actors, relying exclusively on paintings, statues, and their details, while Fredric March’s voiceover chaperoned us through Michelangelo’s biography and the history of Italy’s Renaissance.
In form and substance, Sin and The Titan couldn’t be more different. It’s not just that Michelangelo is never shown working in Konchalovsky’s epic; his spellbinding achievements are virtually elided from the frame, and only bop up in the film’s coda. That’s because Sin is much less interested in portraying an artist at work (or in showing the work itself) than it is in dissecting the conflicts that spawned his masterpieces. It is not the act of creation that Konchalovsky dramatizes, but its origins: the material constraints, urges, and demons haunting his subject. As it was for another of its predecessors, Carol Reed’s Charlton Heston-starring 1965 The Agony and the Ecstasy, Sin affords ample time to the tug of war between the warring families for which Michelangelo toiled, and which demanded his undivided loyalty. We kick off with the master promising a majestic grave for Pope Julius II (Massimo De Francovich) of the Della Rovere clan; when the pope dies and the rival Medici nab his seat with their own Leo X (Simone Toffanin), the plans are thwarted, old contracts voided, new commissions ordered.
The Titan: Story of Michelangelo (Robert J. Flaherty and Richard Lyford, 1950)
Sin’s elision of Michelangelo’s oeuvre is telling. It reveals the kind of bid the film, like so many other artist biopics before it, ultimately hinges on: the idea that we’ll find the man’s life just as thrilling as his art. And how could we not? All the conspiracies and intrigues he was involved in are the stuff of lore, and though prior knowledge of the other players certainly helps, there’s something thrilling about the tragicomedy to which Konchalovsky submits his Michelangelo, struggling as he must to make sure his wealthy backers won’t realize he’s still working for both parties. On top of that, Sin devotes much of its second half to the carving of marble in Carrara’s quarries, placing Michelangelo at the helm of the operations. It’s the film’s most entrancing sequence; watching Testone guide workers and blocks like a possessed helmsman, I thought of a curious hybrid pegged somewhere between Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo and Dante’s Ulysses, figures who, much like Michelangelo himself, redefined the boundaries of human possibilities.
Still, why did the lack of shots of the master at work feel like an omission? And why did that feel so noticeable? All through Sin, I felt as though Konchalovsky was testing my own expectations as to what the film should look like, what it should tell. I was left grappling with questions that aren’t just pertinent to Konchalovsky’s, but all artist biopics. What is it that we want from them, exactly? What do we expect them to explain, to account, to reveal?
If the answer is simply a faithful summation of their life and creative struggles, the scaffolding so many of them rely on fits the bill. The Agony and the Ecstasy was based on a novel by Irving Stone, who also penned Lust for Life, a fictionalized biography of Vincent Van Gogh which Vincente Minnelli drew on for his 1956 adaptation of the same name. Starring Kirk Douglas as Van Gogh and Anthony Quinn as Paul Gauguin, Minnelli's film is full of expected tropes. There’s the artist as a vulnerable, tormented hero. The breakthrough moment in which his talent is first made apparent. The antagonism with the creative community around him. The inevitable interplay of fame and misfortune. You can see the same motifs ricochet intact in a vast pantheon of films, never mind how far-flung their settings—from The Agony and the Ecstasy to Julian Schnabel’s At Eternity’s Gate (2018) via Ed Harris’s Pollock (2000). All these biopics feel like they’ve come out of the same mold; as Steven Jacobs has astutely noted, they often “seem to refer more to each other than to the lives of the original characters they are dealing with.”
But what if a film is after something far more elusive—not just a dramatization of an artist’s biography, but the very mystery of artistic creation? How exactly do you account for, and show, the struggle to bring art into the world? Jacques Rivette attempted that with La Belle Noiseuse (1991), in which an aging painter finishes a masterpiece abandoned ten years prior thanks to a chance encounter with a new muse. But the painter in question is a fictional one. Based on a short story by Balzac, “Le Chef d’Oeuvre Inconnu,” the film asks us to regard Frenhofer (played by Michel Piccoli) as the illustrious genius everyone hails him as. There’s a leap of faith involved in the choice, but insofar as capturing what bringing an artwork to life looks like, La Belle Noiseuse is far more convincing and gripping than other tributes to real-life icons—formulaic biopics à la Pollock, say, where the man’s career-defining pivot to action painting is reduced to a perfunctory montage, with Ed Harris dribbling paint and Marcia Gay Harden announcing, “You’ve done it, Pollock—you’ve cracked it wide open.”
That La Belle Noiseuse remains immune to such inauthenticity owes to Rivette’s ability to film artistic creation as an organic, gradual process. With its long takes of Frenhofer resurrecting his belated chef d’oeuvre—one sketch at a time—it comes astonishingly close to capturing the very materialization of a work of art. Locked with Piccoli’s Frenhofer and his muse, Emmanuelle Béart’s Marianne, inside a studio that feels closer to a church than an atelier, the act of painting becomes a séance, a holy, electrifying experience. “The truth of creation,” Marie Lathers has written about these moments, “resides in piecemeal construction—in the painstaking scenes of drawing so meticulously recorded in the film.” You could argue the same holds true for another extraordinary portrait of an artist and his masterpiece, Jack Hazan’s A Bigger Splash (1973), where a heart-broken real-life David Hockney must reconnect with his former model and lover Peter Schlesinger to complete his iconic “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures).” Watching Hockney and Frenhofer build their works—slowly, painfully, methodically—we don’t just witness a piece of art come into being, we are invited to partake in its making, to an extent that leaves us emotionally invested both in those paintings and the people who ushered them into the world.
La Belle Noiseuse (Jacques Rivette, 1991)
A Bigger Splash (Jack Hazan, 1973)
So where does the truth of creation reside in Sin? In an interview from two years back, Konchalovsky told me one of the biggest challenges he and co-scribe Elena Kiseleva faced was the staggering amount of information about Michelangelo that had already been recorded long before the master passed. The breadth of material formed a kind of straightjacket; to break free, Konchalovsky eventually modeled the film’s narrative onto a genre known as “visions,” a literary form that predated Dante, where religious writings teemed with hallucinations and dreams. This explains some of Sin’s most intimate and harrowing moments, mirages where Michelangelo turns to the heavens in search for solace and answers. Ironically, his efforts to commune with the otherworldly are just as hopeless as our own attempts to decode his genius. “It just comes to me,” that remark Testone tosses to De Francovich early on as the pope gapes at his marbles, is as close as the film gets to accounting for the mystery of his talent.
It’s curious that Sin should end the same way Andrei Rublev did, parading Michelangelo’s masterpieces right before the end credits. I suspect Konchalovsky wants us to read this as a kind of causal relationship: the artist’s life, and the world around them, is what ultimately explains their works. The truth behind the art Sin is concerned with—the kind that, five hundred years on, still leaves us heart-shaken—lies in a paradox: it exists both despite and because of the horrors of the world out of which it emerged. That Sin cannot solve that paradox, or locate the origins of Michelangelo’s talent, is not a shortcoming. It’s part of the very same lesson Michelangelo will eventually understand while staring at the rugged and humbling immensity of the Tuscan quarries, the ghost of Dante by his side: “I was looking for the divine—I only found man.”