Luchino Visconti (1971)
Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita, Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice, Sam Mendes’ American Beauty – (in)famous screen stories of a middle-aged man’s obsession with an underage beauty: the obsession, if not endorsed by the film-maker, is presented as undeniable. Each film was somewhat controversial when it first appeared; plenty of people now think all three beyond the pale. That may have to do not just with what’s on the screen but what happened, or is alleged to have happened, off-camera. Sue Lyon was fourteen when she played the title character in Kubrick’s film; a year after Lyon’s death (in 2019), the journalist Sarah Weinman claimed that Lolita‘s producer, James B Harris, and his child star were lovers during the shoot (an allegation that Harris, now in his nineties, neither confirmed nor denied). Mena Suvari, who in fact was nineteen when she played sixteen-year-old Angela in American Beauty, has written about a ‘weird’ behind-the-scenes experience with Kevin Spacey but was clear that he made no off-set sexual advances to her (which is hardly surprising). Björn Andrésen, fifteen when Death in Venice was made, has described his discomfort playing the Polish youngster Tadzio, the object of Gustav von Aschenbach’s infatuation, and with how ‘that son of a bitch’ Luchino Visconti ‘sexualized me’ in the film, as well as taking Andrésen to a gay nightclub.
I was a teenager too when I first saw Death in Venice in the early 1970s; perhaps I’ve seen it again in the meantime but, if so, it was decades ago. Returning to it now in BFI’s Visconti season, I found some things marvellous, other things bad. Whatever the extent of his exploitation of Björn Andrésen, Visconti’s re-interpretation of the Thomas Mann material detracts from the film. For a start, Andrésen is ill-used. It’s Visconti’s camera rather than Aschenbach that sometimes gazes at the Ganymede face and the mane of wavy golden hair but the frequent close-ups of Tadzio don’t tell you much, except that you could be watching Monica Vitti’s androgynous younger sibling. Andrésen’s hand-on-hip poses – a staple of gay impersonation on TV shows and in school playgrounds of the 1970s – are unfortunate, and obviously not the young actor’s own idea. In the Mann novella, Aschenbach is a writer rather than, as in the film, a classical composer. It’s true Gustav Mahler’s death in 1911, as well as Mann’s own interest in a Polish boy on a visit to the Venice Lido in the same year and Goethe’s ‘Marienbad Elegy’, was in Mann’s mind when he wrote Death in Venice (first published in 1912) but Visconti’s reasons for making Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde) a musical rather than a literary artist seem spurious. There are flashbacks to philosophical arguments between him and Alfred (Mark Burns), Aschenbach’s friend and erstwhile student (and an invention of Visconti and his co-scenarist Nicola Badalucco), about the meaning of art and beauty. The writing of these debates is stilted and overheated, with acting to match from Mark Burns. The Mahler on the soundtrack – extracts from his third and fifth symphonies – is one of Death of Venice‘s most revered features but it’s too dominant. Visconti seems to use the music as if saying to Dirk Bogarde, ‘Beat that!’
Yet Bogarde often does. I mean not that his acting is ‘better’ than Mahler’s music but that his beautifully layered portrait of Aschenbach is integral to the film whereas the music blatantly is not. The Alfred bits inevitably defeat Bogarde but, whenever he has the chance to build a character, he does. This is true even in the virtually silent flashbacks to Gustav’s marriage and the death of his child. Marisa Berenson as his wife partners Bogarde well in these short episodes. It’s a pity her last appearance is at the disastrous premiere of Aschenbach’s latest composition, where his wife shares the screen with Alfred and a jeering audience. (The scene is so poorly staged it made me think I’d been hard on A Complete Unknown‘s account of Bob Dylan’s notorious electric set at the Newport Folk Festival – which I’d happened to see a few days before.)
Gustav von Aschenbach shows a peremptory, irrational impatience with various people providing services to him – an ominously insistent boatman (uncredited, as far as I can tell), the fatuously reassuring hotel manager (Romolo Valli), a railway-station ticket-office man (Bruno Boschetti) – and gets angry with them all. Bogarde was often a less impressive actor when he raised his voice but that quality works for him here: the chasm between Aschenbach’s fury and how little it achieves underlines how trapped he is. Even so, one of Bogarde’s finest moments comes on just about the only occasion his anger does makes a difference, at the railway station. Having decided to leave Venice, he’s enraged to learn his trunk has gone missing; almost literally stamping his foot, he declares he won’t leave the city until the luggage has been found. Immediately afterwards, he sits on a station bench smiling to himself, rather enjoying having let off steam. The smile remains when he realises he’ll now be able to see Tadzio again.
The wonder of Bogarde’s performance is his ability to combine behavioural detail with the bigger themes of the story. His hand movements – for example, when Gustav eats a strawberry – are precisely expressive. He’s just as effective in conveying the depths of Aschenbach’s fearful despair: about getting old; that Venice, anxious to protect its tourist trade, is covering up the extent of an outbreak of ‘Asiatic’ cholera in the city; that Tadzio is therefore in danger. Bogarde gets across both Aschenbach’s idealisation of the boy and how he relishes rare moments of intimacy with him, even though that intimacy – which in any case isn’t physical – is entirely the older man’s invention. Tadzio mildly misbehaves on the beach and is gently scolded by his mother (Silvana Mangano) and the governess (Nora Ricci) to him and his three younger sisters. Aschenbach, sitting nearby in his deck chair, is privately delighted to be a witness. That ‘privately’ is important: it’s by keeping his delight to himself that he can pretend to be a unique recipient of Tadzio’s mischievous charm.
I find the soundtrack more remarkable when, instead of music, it features noises on the beach (these bring to mind Sylvia Plath’s phrase – ‘shrunk voices /… half their old size’ – in ‘Berck-Plage’) and at the hotel. The seemingly dubbed English dialogue isn’t nearly as problematic as in Visconti’s previous film, The Damned (1969) – partly because there’s so much less of it. (The conversation within Tadzio’s family is almost absurdly minimal.) Pasqualino De Santis’s cinematography is justly celebrated although the photographic images tend to eclipse the moving ones. The superb opening sequence is a good example. The beauty of the composition – sunrise on a sea empty except for the boat carrying Aschenbach towards the Venice Lido – is dramatically undercut by the thick black smoke that belches from the boat. The city’s palpable sense of rot is well visualised, too – the fusion of what Aschenbach perceives to be external evidence of the cholera outbreak with the larger apprehensions of mortality occupying his thoughts, is one of Visconti’s finest achievements in the film. The camerawork on the beach is often ingenious even if, as noted above, the point of view being shown is not always clear.
Thomas Mann supplied the opportunities for Visconti to indulge his appetite for signalling moral corruption through physical ugliness or deformity. There’s the dwarfish elderly man (Luigi Battaglia) on the landing stage, whose hysterical cackles welcome the protagonist to Venice and whose clothes and grotesque make-up exactly prefigure Aschenbach’s appearance in his eventual death scene. There’s the vagrant (Marco Tulli) who collapses at the railway station. There’s the ribald minstrel band that pesteringly serenades Aschenbach and other guests in the hotel’s outdoor restaurant. This is a strong sequence although there are too many close-ups of the gap-toothed mouth of the lead singer (another uncredited performer), whose oppressive proximity to his audience is more than enough. This singer seems the incarnation of pestilence, let alone a harbinger of it.
Aschenbach’s meeting with the barber (Franco Fabrizi) who dyes his hair and puts rouge on his cheeks may be his most peaceful encounter with the lower orders but his cosmetic rejuvenation at the barber’s hands is an increasingly painful spectacle. When he learns that the Polish family really is about to leave Venice, Aschenbach – though already ill and weak, and with a trail of black dye trickling down the sides of his face – heads for the beach and his usual deck chair. His relief at seeing Tadzio there is spoiled when the latter starts fighting with an older boy (Sergio Garfagnoli) and comes off worse. When Tadzio then walks out to the sea and half turns towards him, Gustav seems to think he’s beckoning and tries to get up from his deck chair before collapsing back into it. Visconti pulls back to reveal a brief commotion among concerned onlookers before Aschenbach’s body is carried away. So much of the film has been happening inside Gustav von Aschenbach’s head that the camera’s closing retreat into objectivity is powerful. The central consciousness of Death in Venice is suddenly a corpse.
25 January 2025
