Death in Venice (1971) Directed by Luscino Visconti
Death is Venice, based on Thomas Mann's novella, is a movie that could easily be misunderstood in this day and age. Many viewers could presumably see it as a kind of gay, tortured
Lolita what with a much older man enthralled by a young adolescent, even to the point of stalking him and his family. But that would miss the point of Mann's work completely. Gustav Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde in a commanding performance) is a classical music composer of such rigorous standards that his best friend Alfred accuses Aschenbach of excluding feeling in his search for artistic perfection. Aschenbach's rigid standards extend to his morality for he believes that to create his art, his conduct must be exemplary and restrained, that being a minimum condition for creating something pure. As Alfred tells him, "For you, every slip is a fall, a catastrophe" and chides Gustav that he has succeeded in his music of only abstracting the senses, not embracing them. Alfred scoffs at the notion that art is the least concerned with morality. He sees his friend's quest for perfection as essentially inhuman.
On an enforced vacation to Venice because of his ill health, Gustav plans only to rest. However, by chance, he observes Tadzio, a boy of surpassing beauty, who is in his early teens. He and his mother and several sisters are staying at the same hotel as Gustav. Initially against his own will, Gustav slowly becomes ever more attracted to Tadzio, who represents to the composer an ideal of beauty that completely breaks down Gustav's carefully structured sense of morality and propriety. Suddenly he has allowed his feelings to overwhelm him. Combined with his frailty due to his heart affliction, he begins to lose control. It is as though in the face of such natural perfection, everything he once believed as an artist and a man is turned topsy turvy. For his part, the boy is curious about the old man, perhaps even a bit of a tease, but at no time does he suspect the depth of Gustav's feelings. When Gustav realizes that cholera is spreading in Venice, he beseeches Tadzio's mother to leave the city, and she prepares to do so. By this time, thoroughly detached from his moorings, Gustav allows himself to be groomed in such a way that he looks grotesque, a sad parody of his lost youth and his lost ideals. Watching Tadzio from afar one last time, he is made distraught when the boy wrestles with a friend. Finally, he dies on his beach chair and is unceremoniously carted off the beach. He has found perfection, but he has tragically underrated the power of his own feelings.
The movie makes two principle changes from the novella. First Gustav is transformed from a writer to a music composer. This is a brilliant move because it allows Gustav's music to underscore the emotions of the movie. Mahler's 3rd and 5th symphonies are used as accompaniments to the drama, and the gorgeous music evokes the depth of Gustav's tragedy, setting a mood that is reinforced by the equally gorgeous cinematography. Director Luscino Visconti sets the tone right away, starting the movie with an establishing shot, almost a minute and a half long, of a steamer sailing into the Venice harbour as a dark purple dawn just begins to break across the sky. The visual beauty, the absence of language, the unhurried pace all lay the groundwork for the presentation of the downfall that is to come. (Visconti is one of the fathers of neo-realism, some arguing that his
La Terra Trema was the very first work of neo-realism in Italian cinema. He is a long way from his roots here--
Death in Venice is a stately, elegaic, sumptuous work that more closely resembles "slow" cinema than neo-realism. Indeed, I think it is among the most beautiful movies to look at ever made).
The second major change in the novella that Visconti makes is to include conversations between Alfred and Gustav that don't exist in the book. While these scenes present essential information about Gustav's approach to art and life (virtually the same), the acting is often overwrought thanks to Mark Burns as Alfred who screeches all his lines like an amateur. Too bad, because we don't need a distraction when the ideas are as important as they are in this film. Bogarde is mostly an innocent bystander in these scenes; however, he is absolutely brilliant in the rest of the movie. Throughout the two hour and ten minute movie, he is virtually always on screen, yet with relatively few lines of dialogue. Nonetheless, he held my attention expertly by creating a character of great depth who is simultaneously fussy, frail, impatient, and desperate, but also very human--a man whose tragic flaw is to underrate the power of human feelings. He distrusts them, in art and life, and it is ironic in the extreme that he was perhaps wise to do so. For when he finally allows his feelings free rein, they consume him.
