Directed by Luchino Visconti

Starring Dirk Bogarde, Bjorn Andresen, Marisa Berenson

A widowed German composer, suffering from ill-health and general decrepitude, travels to Venice for a respite. There he encounters Beauty in distilled form: the young Tadzio, vacationing in Venice with his family. The composer, Gustav von Aschenbach, becomes obsessed with the 14-year old boy as a kind of Platonic ideal of Youth before dying on a lonely stretch of beach.

If you think I’ve given the plot away, you didn’t consider the title of the movie too carefully. Freely adapted from Thomas Mann’s novella, Death in Venice is a masterpiece of atmosphere. The ‘plot,’ so-called, is a series of mostly fleeting encounters between the old man and the object of his attention. In flashbacks, we see Aschenbach as a passionate, engaged intellectual arguing for the ’spirituality’ of Beauty as an abstract ideal, “The creation of beauty and purity is a spiritual act.” In the present, he is a broken, isolated man lingering like a mute ghost in a disintegrating city.

Much has been made of the homoeroticism of Aschenbach’s fixation with Tadzio. Generally interpreted as unconsummated pedophilic desire, the relationship could just as easily be read as an old man’s single-minded pursuit of Beauty as an ideal (the perfectly cast Bjorn Andresen as Tadzio has an androgynous beauty, like a Botticelli angel; his Apollonian distance personifies the abstract ideal that the younger Aschenbach espoused). Tadzio is not so much an object of desire as an object d’art; the dying dream of an old man trying vainly to reclaim the lost ideal of Youth.

Directed by Italian master, Luchino Visconti (The Leopard, The Damned), Death in Venice is a tone-poem; an often arrestingly beautiful meditation on youth, obsession, old age, and the decrepit state of Western Civilization. The Catholic overtones are like a warning: the composer is from Munich, a particularly Catholic city in Germany. Tadzio’s family is Polish, also Catholic. Venice, with St. Mark’s cathedral as its centerpiece, is a dream city of beautiful surfaces and gorgeous architecture. It is also a crumbling, sinking city that relies on the cannibalization of its past to stay afloat, so to speak. Tourists flock to Venice as to a beautiful ruin. With today’s waning churchgoing in Europe and the gradual depletion of its population, one can’t help but think that Mann had been prophetic in his diagnosis of Western Europe as a decaying body obsessed with its beautiful youth, vainly attempting to keep up appearances. As the great theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar once wrote, “We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it.”

At one point, Aschenbach undergoes a make-over to try and make himself look younger, more appealing to his Tadzio. The result is sad, disturbing; Aschenbach’s hair dye bleeds down his forehead as he bakes under the hot Venetian sun, staring out at the slim figure of Tadzio wading out to sea. Visconti always frames Aschenbach on the periphery of the frame, as if he might irrevocably slip off the screen at any moment.

Though Visconti’s deliberate pace and long, lingering shots may try the viewer’s patience, Death in Venice is more than worth the effort. The cinematography is often ravishing and Visconti makes masterful use of Gustav Mahler�s lush, aching fifth Symphony. The tortured Romance of Mahler�s music grants us access to the volcanic passions beneath Aschenbach’s meticulously reserved surface — Aschenbach even resembles Mahler.

The best reason to see Death in Venice is Dirk Bogarde’s careful, fully realized performance as the highly cultured but emotionally stunted Aschenbach. His portrayal of the fragile intellectual in his waning years is a masterpiece of understatement. With very little dialogue, he is able to convey Aschenbach’s bitterness, misanthropy, loneliness, obsession, and pathetic hope for reciprocated affection through a complex network of looks, expressions, gestures, and body language. (Two of cinema’s most expressive, soulful eyes certainly help.) This is one of the loneliest films ever lensed, and Bogarde’s performance beautifully empathizes with a man cut-off from the rest of humanity.

Bogarde completely inhabits Aschenbach. In a film that borders occasionally on the insufferably pretentious, he compels the viewer’s attention; he keeps our interest by making his character’s existential suffering real, embarrassing, pitiable, and heartbreaking all at once. The last scene is a tour-de-force; an aria of lost hope, passion, and tragedy.

Death in Venice takes its time, but builds to a surprisingly emotional climax. Though not for all tastes, the film’s virtues are many, not least of which is Dirk Bogarde as Aschenbach — one of cinema’s greatest actors delivering a towering, heart-wrenching performance.

(A keen-eyed Amazon reviewer noted that both the steamer that carries Aschenbach to Venice and the prostitute he visits in a flashback are named “Esmeralda.” This, of course, is the name Victor Hugo bequeathed to the idealized object of Quasimodo’s affection/obsession in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Make of this what you will, but no one can say Visconti isn�’ a stickler for telling details.)

Posted by John Murphy on Monday, January 21st, 2008 at 2:14 pm.