Mark Reviews Movies: SIN

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 18, 2021

Much is known of the life of Michelangelo Buonarroti, the great High Renaissance artist who sculpted David and the Pietà and painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but what does the life an artist matter when works such as those are left behind? That's the question posed by co-writer/director Andrey Konchalovskiy's Sin, which begins with the artist finishing the famous ceiling in the Vatican and never shows him creating art again.

The result, then, is not quite a biography, because the film essentially bypasses the most important element of its subject's life. In this story, Michelangelo (Alberto Testone) is an artist only by reputation—called "master," even by those who aren't his apprentices, and "the divine one." Konchalovskiy and co-writer Elena Kiseleva's screenplay instead focuses on a great, mounting conflict within the man, as he gradually allows earthly concerns—of material, money, politics, power, and fame—to overwhelm his spiritual ambitions—to create art that inspires a sense of the divine in people.

Konchalovskiy and Kiseleva's story is the study of a faithful man tempted by the ways of the world. Michelangelo essentially lives in poverty, with the money earned from his commissions going toward the materials for the work and his father. Dressed in tattered clothes and often dirty, the artist is eventually caught up in a family feud that encompasses secular and religious politics, between the Della Roveres and the Medicis.

One pope of the former family, who hired Michelangelo to sculpt his great tomb, has died (The artist has a premonition of it, and he also has the occasional vision of demons), and the powerful Medici family has taken the papal throne. Michelangelo wants to complete the tomb, especially since he has been paid twice for it, but the new pope has the funds, the influence, and an untapped mountain of marble for the artist.

There's the political back-and-forth, as the two families battle for the artist's loyalty, and the internal one within Michelangelo, as his greed, pride, and anger transform the hermit-like man into an obsessive, resentful, and paranoid one. Testone's performance is one of subtle evolution and deep anguish.

Konchalovskiy's film fascinates for its attention to detail (A lengthy sequence involving a "monster" marble block is terrifying) and toward Michelangelo's inner struggle. Sin convinces us that, while the art perhaps matters more, the artist is not to be overlooked.

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