“Death In Venice”/”Morte a Venezia” (1971)
Visconti’s adaptation of Thomas Mann‘s novella of doomed, unconsummated homosexual desire set against the backdrop of fading grandeur that was Venice in 1912, is such a famous touchpoint that it can’t be ignored on any list of his essential films, but that shouldn’t be necessarily taken as a ringing endorsement. In fact, the film can also be seen as the embodiment of everything off-putting about Visconti’s oeuvre. Despite weighing in as one of his shorter films (130 minutes) it can feel indulgently overlong, lingering on brief moments so heavily that a momentary glance can become ponderous and not a little precious. This is partly due to the difficulty of gaining any sort of purchase on a character as peevishly buttoned-up as Dirk Bogarde‘s Aschenbach is here: while in altering the character’s profession from writer (in the novella) to composer, Visconti was perhaps hoping to make it feel more cinematic (and certain Mahler pieces are used to good effect), actually it puts Aschenbach’s psychology further out of our reach. Or perhaps it’s more that we can understand him all too readily, but the stiff reserve of the performance and the languid pacing give us very little reason to care. Told in carefully composed static shots and pallid pans, the upper-crust Aschenbach travels to the Lido in Venice for health reasons, where he becomes erotically fixated on a young Polish boy, Tadzio (Bjorn Andresen). It seems the older man, in failing health, losing his vigor and his looks (hence the grotesque rivulet of black hair dye that runs down his deathly white face as he dies) sees in Tadzio not just everything he secretly desires, but everything he once was. Almost more interesting, though, is the background texture: Venice is in the throes of a cholera epidemic that the locals keep secret from the cash-cow tourists like Aschenbach — a fascinating detail that adds to the limbo-like sense of the man’s final days as taking place in a weird quarantine zone between life and death, between beauty and rot, between heaven and hell. It’s hardly entry-level Visconti, and it may prove just too bloodless an experience for some, but it’s probably as a study of this sort of liminality that “Death in Venice” works best.
Suggestions for further watching:
This sampler is really just that, and there are those who will no doubt argue the merits of any of the remaining six features films from Visconti as deserving of inclusion here. The two further titles, however, that I was closest to including were from either end of his career: 1952’s “Bellissima,” an unusual-for-Visconti comedy title, with a nice line in inside-baseball satire in which Anna Magnani plays a mother determined to get her daughter into the movies; and his very last film, “L’Innocente,” a period melodrama released the year of his death in 1976.
But do please let us know in the comments about your favorite Visconti films, or even moments (there are so many standout scenes and shots across all his films), or take me to task on any of my interpretations of the above titles.
