Death in Venice (1971)

Italy
2*

Director:
Luchino Visconti
Screenwriters:
Luchino Visconti
Nicola Badalucco
Director of Photography:
Pasqualino De Santis

Running time: 130 minutes

Some films don’t age well. It’s usually not a question of the film’s content but rather of its presentation. Death in Venice, in which an artist spends all his time and energy stalking a young boy whom he considers to be the embodiment of beauty, lacks the content to sustain its more than two-hour running time and uses an excessive amount of zooms to animate the content that is deteriorating as steadily as its decrepit central character.

Dirk Bogarde plays Gustav von Aschenbach (allegedly, this character is loosely based on Gustav Mahler), a musician who goes to Venice in order to recuperate after a fainting spell. At the Grand Hôtel des Bains, where he stays for the duration of his trip, he notices a young Polish boy, Tadzio, played by the Swedish actor Björn Andrésen. Tadzio is enigmatic and stands out from the crowd not because of his looks, but because the director chooses to bathe him in light wherever he goes.

I thought the androgynous Tadzio was rather bland, and his ridiculous haircut is an embarrassment. This teenager notices Aschenbach’s gaze and delights in the attention, often meeting his gaze and holding it, smiling quizzically at the older man who is always hovering around him but too reserved to introduce himself. Aschenbach chooses to keep his distance, but I found his passivity very frustrating: Ultimately, the character seems to choose inaction over action. He chooses to drool and does not interact with young Tadzio. Empathy becomes more and more difficult, if not impossible because the character is so pathetic.

Aschenbach’s interest in Tadzio is not unwanted by the young boy. This point could have been made with some subtlety and developed in an interesting way, but the film contains scene after scene in which Aschenbach leers at Tadzio while Tadzio smiles back in silence. Not much else happens. Oh, right, there is the cholera epidemic, which slowly grabs hold of the city and squeezes the life out of its victims, in the same way that all my interest in Aschenbach’s lovelorn existence is squeezed dry. But by that stage, we have long stopped caring.

Almost every scene contains a zoom, and this kind of filmmaking, in spite of Visconti’s pedigree, seems more like a childish fascination with the zoom than a director who has a firm grasp on the medium. Mahler’s music is used sparingly (the only music on the soundtrack), and some scenes, like the two boys wrestling on the beach while Aschenbach watches in horror, are presented without any sound – a very prudent move.

However, the film itself is plodding, to say the least, and Aschenbach’s character might as well have been a zombie. The flashbacks are even worse than the scenes set in the present: Abstract discussions of art and beauty pepper the storyline in the past and provide a very theoretical framework for the character. The setting, pre-WWI Venice, is admirably recreated, and the final shot of Tadzio on the beach is magnificent, but for the most part Death in Venice is underdeveloped and completely overrated.