Death in Venice (film)
I chiefly love this film for the luscious Mahler’s 5th Symphony that pervades it.
Visconti misses, or avoids, the subtlety of the novel’s development of the relationship between the two characters. In the Mann version, the man can never really know what the boy thinks of him; they do not speak, and if the boy favours him sometimes with a look or a smile, he favours many others as well, because that is his nature. It is entirely possible, the way Mann tells the story, that the boy is totally unaware of any homosexual implication — and the man, indeed, may also be in love with an ideal rather than a person. No such possibility exists in the heavy-handed Visconti retelling. The boy’s function in the film, which he performs at least two dozen times, is to self-consciously pose in front of the man, turn slowly, smile sweetly, and turn languorously away. This is almost literally the only physical characteristic the boy has in the movie; and Visconti lays on the turns, looks, and smiles with such a heavy hand that the boy could almost be accused of hustling.
By choosing to limit his story to this level, Visconti loses the philosophical content of the Thomas Mann work, and no amount of heavy-handed flashbacks can restore it. We see Aschenbach in discussions with colleagues, with his wife and child, and then at the child’s funeral; we see him seemingly impotent in a bordello, and, unforgivably, Visconti even throws in a concert at which Aschenbach is booed, then comforted by his wife.
The world of the Lido of sixty years ago has been re-created in painstaking detail. The fashions, the entertainments, the table settings reveal Visconti’s compulsion for accuracy.
If Björn Andrésen, Visconti’s Tadzio looks a bit too much like a singer in a boy band, Lief Garrett meets one of the Hanson brothers, an androgynous fantasy for teenage girls, then Dirk Bogarde is genuinely repellent. Bogarde is a handsome, if nondescript looking actor, but here he, quite intentionally, makes himself ugly. It’s not a flamboyant, colorful ugliness a la Christian Bale in American Hustle, but a gray, quiet, lifeless ugliness. Aschenbach is a fussy little man who’s not only aging, but lacks masculine force to begin with. As he pursues Tadzio, as the cholera epidemic that will take his life closes in on Venice, we learn, in a series of flashbacks that show his life’s work being methodically shot down by fate, crushed by a world that doesn’t understand him, or strangled by his own personal failings, what brought him to his dead end in the famously beautiful city of canals. He has a wife — the beautiful Marissa Berenson — and a child. They both die. He goes to a brothel. He’s impotent. Above all, while an acclaimed composer, the sources of his inspiration have dried up. He argues with Alfred, a hyper-aggressive friend and artistic collaborator played by an obnoxiously over the top Mark Burns. Alfred screams at him that art is about the senses. Aschenbach protests that, on the contrary, art is about cutting yourself off from your senses, that it’s about seeking the Platonic ideal through discipline and form.
In the second volume of his autobiography, Snakes and Ladders, Bogarde recounts how the film crew created his character’s deathly white skin for the final scenes of the film, just as he dies. The makeup department tried various face paints and creams, none of which were satisfactory, as they smeared. When a suitable cream was found and the scenes were shot, Bogarde recalls that his face began to burn terribly. The tube of cream was found and written on the side was “Keep away from eyes and skin”: the director had ignored this and had been testing it out, as small patches, on various members of the film crew, before finally having it applied to Bogarde’s face.
In another volume of his memoirs, An Orderly Man, Dirk Bogarde relates that, after the finished film was screened for them by Visconti in Los Angeles, the Warner Bros. executives wanted to write off the project, fearing it would be banned in the United States for obscenity because of its subject matter. They eventually relented when a gala premiere of Death in Venice was organized in London, with Elizabeth II and Princess Anne in attendance, to gather funds for the sinking city.
As preparation for the role of Tadzio, director Luchino Visconti took Björn Andrésen to gay clubs in order to experience mannerisms and reactions from gays since he was about to play the object of desire of another man. Of this experience, Andrésen said: “I was just 16 and Visconti and the team took me to a gay nightclub. Almost all the crew were gay. The waiters at the club made me feel very uncomfortable. They looked at me uncompromisingly as if I was a nice meaty dish. I knew I couldn’t react. It would have been social suicide. But it was the first of many such encounters.”
Alfred: Do you know what lies at the bottom of the mainstream? Mediocrity.
Gustav von Aschenbach: I remember we had one of these in my father’s house. The aperture through which the sand runs is so tiny that… that first it seems as if the level in the upper glass never changes. To our eyes it appears that the sand runs out only… only at the end… and until it does, it’s not worth thinking about… ’til the last moment… when there’s no more time left to think about it.
Gustav von Aschenbach: You know sometimes I think that artists are rather like hunters aiming in the dark. They don’t know what their target is, and they don’t know if they’ve hit it. But you can’t expect life to illuminate the target and steady your aim. The creation of beauty and purity is a spiritual act.
Alfred: No Gustav, no. Beauty belongs to the senses. Only to the senses.
Gustav von Aschenbach: You cannot reach the spirit with the senses. You cannot. It’s only by complete domination of the senses that you can ever achieve wisdom, truth, and human dignity.
Alfred: In all the world, there is no impurity so impure as old age.
Alfred: Wisdom. Truth. Human Dignity. All finished! Now there is no reason why you cannot go to your grave with your music.
Alfred: You have achieved perfect balance: the man and the artist are one. They have touched bottom together.
Alfred: You never possessed chastity. Chastity is the gift of purity not the painful result of old age and you are *old* Gustav.
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