Mahler (1974) 115m.
Eighth and last of Ken Russell's composer biographies (I think its safe enough to discount LISZTOMANIA), which I walked seven miles to see as a teenager when it appeared in a one-off screening. Film is still as difficult to see nowadays, but undoubtedly of interest to Russell fans. Story recaps the life of Austrian Jew Gustav Mahler (Robert Powell) while he takes one last Freudian train journey back to Vienna with his wife Alma (Georgina Hale). Film doesn't reach the heights of other Russell opuses but is still more interesting than most slick productions you'll see in the mainstream. The main problem with it is that Mahler himself isn't that interesting and doesn't lead a particularly exceptional life. Granted, he did find fame and success as a conducter (and something of a monstre sacre) but the same could be said about a novelist, and the idea of watching someone writing a book for two hours doesn't appeal to me either. Another problem Russell has to contend with is Mahler's music - it doesn't have the instant appeal of other composers he has handled, and is an acquired taste to anyone unfamiliar with 20th century composition. Neither does it seem to choreograph well with Russell's images - it doesn't inspire me to buy the soundtrack, anyway, which I presume is part of the reason Russell wanted to make this film, i.e. to pay homage to an artist he admired while bringing his life and work to a mass audience with the same pop sensibilities he would use the following year in TOMMY.
Russell gives his film visual impetus to keep his audience watching - apart from the framing device of the train, MAHLER is made up almost wholly of dream sequences, fantasies, and offbeat set-pieces. But it all seems flat this time around. Maybe that's because many of the heavily symbolic, hallucinatory images are immediately followed by postscripts in which the characters explain to each other what we have just watched. However, I can also see this as Russell's way of defusing accusations that he is being pretentious. The most jarring of these sequences is Mahler's conversion to Catholicism, filmed as if it were a silent comedy (Russell himself is a Catholic convert, which may explain his interest in this part of Mahler's life). As a stand-alone sequence it's a lot of fun, but it looks like it was dropped in from a different movie. MAHLER's preponderance with visuals also reminds us that Russell is more of a technical director than an actor's director. His characters all sound alike - it's obviously Russell dialogue that they're speaking. Hale, as Alma, has to switch from petulant to sweet to hardened to despairing, while Powell just looks like a gloomy guy in a hat. The logic behind Powell's saturnine performance is explained at the end, when we discover he has tonsillitis (a precursor to his death shortly after), but by then it's too late for us to really care.
Still, Russell has enthusiasm, and does well with a limited budget (instead of filming in Europe he once again returned to his favorite location, the Lake District). Mahler's daughter Anna, who was 70 at the time of film's release, gave Russell permission to make his biography after initial reservations about what he'd done with Tchaikovsky in THE MUSIC LOVERS.
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