DEATH IN VENICE
A film review by Ralph Benner
Copyright 1996 Ralph Benner
Venice -- the great watery serpent of indefinable plagues and forebodings, the last grand visitation of rotting romanticism, the Grim Reaper as elegant theme park. This city's atmosphere of Borgesian imagery is the quintessential setting for the pitifu end of Gustav von Aschenbach in Thomas Mann's exquistely prosed DEATH IN VENICE. There's no locale on earth more conducive to let Aschenbach feel, as Mann wrote, "a dark contentment with what was taking place...(the) wicked secret of the city was welded ith (my) own secret." But too much of moribund Venice and rationalized sexual repression can do a reader in: Mann's writer, who lost Cicero's "foundation of eloquence" early in the story, is already pegged a sexual malcontent by the fourth page and by t time his Aschenbach finds in a fourteen year old his Prince Charming and goes on and on about the boy's Narcissism, you're very close to exhaustion; you can't wait until the sirocco -- the winds off the Mediterranean that have been known to carry death - overtake him so you can be relieved of his unfulfilled desires. Mann believed "writers are happiest with an idea which can become all emotion and an emotion all idea," but he's insistently Germanic with mythological veneration of beauty as pardon for e emotion that dare not speak its name. He may have gone beyond his Germanism; he's eclipsed the spiritual and physical enthrall of beauty -- the young Tadzio is, by end, not Herrmes but Michelangelo's David -- and made Aschenbach an intellectual pedoph e. The story isn't so much a study of the dangers of consuming beauty as it is punishment for private thoughts as crime never committed.
Luchino Visconti's movie version of DEATH IN VENICE, even with changing Aschenbach from writer to composer, modelled after Mahler, is reconstructed with stunning fidelity to Mann: just about every major scene in the story is brought to the screen witho compromise. Visually, with maybe not more than a few dozen pages of dialogue, Visconti and his crew -- photographer Pasqualino De Santis (who also did 1984's best movie BIZET'S CARMEN), costume designer Piero Tosi and art director Ferdinando Scarfiotti - give us a languishing, glamorously stifling Venetian holiday at the turn of the century as a malignancy of class snobbery; the images reek with an aura of knowing denial. While his camera scales Venice to exacting proportions -- St. Mark's Square is m e to look its real size -- De Santis also catches the funereal gandola and its seats perfectly, just as Mann did, and the green goo of the canals and the cold, damp walls you bump into as you make passage through the mazy narrow walkways, which can be l e journeys into a menacing past. Even the author's pathos that makes you squeamish -- the barber's vulgar touch-up of Aschenbach's hair, cheeks and lips -- is here in all its ingloriousness.
Dirk Bogarde's Gustav is made up to look like Thomas Mann, but he doesn't have Mann's imposing height or air of eloquence, and he could never be accused of being Germanic; every flabby cell of his being confirms he's an English pris. It's this later pa that makes him wrong for the role but obviously appealing to those closeted academicians who rave about his performance -- because educated inverts who don't engage in the sex of their wishes and who hide between the stacks of their libraries often do come grotesque parodies. Bogarde manages the slow death of consumption -- a crumbling artist devoured by beauty and its controvertable attractions and hindered by restrictive societal proprieties. And the less he says, the better the performance. But Bo rde isn't Aschenbach the German, and without that identity the story loses its tragedy; though Gustav is already in the fall of his lifetime, it's his Teutonic masculinity that he betrays in his feeble attempts to reenergize. We're supposed to be in hor r at his dissipatedness when he uses any trick to recapture what's gone forever. As Bogarde plays him, Gustav's a dignified horror right from the start and so when he's being primped up or when he slumps over to his death, with his hair dye running down is face, there's no tragic punch. He's a pathetic English Yuri out of a gay Pasternak -- and his Lara doesn't continue onward through the snow but out to sea, stopping long enough to give the old man his last jollies with a David come-on.
What's ambiguous about Mann's story is Aschenbach's pride in virility -- his lack of admiration for his own maleness -- and that is the opening that Visconti takes advantage of through Bogarde. There is something annoyingly simpy about Aschenbach, espe ally to those of us who are attracted to Germans and don't see them as fearful when it comes to their sexual curiosities. Discreet, yes, procrastinators, no. One of the more effective psychological weapons Hitler was able to use on his own people is the doration of assumed Aryan perfection; he took advantage of their idolization of their own robust, hearty physicality. He didn't invent it, he only re-packaged what has always been there. (Enamoured of Germany, having spent a year in the baroque conceit Wurzburg and having returned to the country three times since, I can say with a modicum of authority that some of the most exciting experiences a traveller can have is finding one's self inflamed by the Germanic; the heat can be best described as sexua fascism.) Recent biographers claim Mann also had personal conflicts with his own attractions to men -- particularly to orthodox Georgian Ernst Glockner. And if true, this explains why his Aschenbach hadn't the inner-fortitude to go to his logical step: German true to his loins would have at least sneaked a peek into Tadzio's beach tent.
Mann ejaculates, "With astonishment Aschenbach noted that the boy was absolutely beautiful. His face, pale and reserved, framed with honey-colored hair, the straight sloping nose, the lovely mouth, the expression of sweet and godlike seriousness, recal d Greek sculpture of the noblest periods; and the complete purity of the form was accompanied by such a rare personal charm that, as he watched, he felt that he had never met with anything equally felicitous in nature...it was clear that in his existenc the first factors were gentleness and tenderness. The shears had been resolutely kept from his beautiful hair; like a Prince Charming's, it fell in curls over his forehead, his ears, and still deeper, across his neck." The more Mann's Aschenbach goes on dolizing Tadzio, the more you wonder where an actor could be found to physically live up to the description. Visconti did, though, in Bjorn Andresen. If the effeminacy isn't quite Grecian, he's still a ravishing icon; he's so delicate a creation that ev yone wants him and at the same time wants to protect him. Mann suggests that Tadzio is oblivious tease without sexual experience, but Andresen is directed to be a precocious temptress; Visconti allows Andresen to imply through too many glances a recepti ness to invitation. But I couldn't respond to Andresen, perhaps because I kept seeing in him his British equivalent actress Patricia Hodge, whose identical porcelain symmetry, while an attraction in THE LIVES AND LOVES OF A SHE-DEVIL and THE CLONING OF ANNA MAY, can also leave you stone cold. (They're not quite celestial androgynies, they're Draculized inflatibles.) From the movie's point of view, though, there can be no question where Tadzio's looks come from -- Silvana Mangano. She's a breathtaking rgaret Leighton.
Born into authentic nobility in Milan in 1906, Visconti became a Communist ideologue who, with his OSSESSIONE (which borrowed heavily from James Cain's THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE), raged against Fascism. When Mussolini and Hitler were finished off, so were the director's passions for the proletariat, though he'd periodically return to condemn Fascism -- 1969's THE DAMNED his last major treatise. Aficionados of trash still talk about mommie Ingrid Thulin and sonnie transvestite Helmut erger bedding down together; about the "Night of the Long Knives" sequence; about what goodies were edited out. (The truth may be that, for all Visconti's harping about the Nazis, he's an inveterate German, addicted to his adopted culture's degenerate c ssicism.) Most of Visconti's time was spent dreaming about and occasionally making epics on the aristocracy of Europe -- THE LEOPARD (with Burt Lancaster doing Visconti) and LUDWIG, about the innocently mad King of Bavaria, famous for his addiction to r l fairy tale castles, Wagner and his music. Attracted to DEATH IN VENICE partly as a tale of woe about unconsumated Adonis worship that Mann literally came upon while visiting Venice -- almost all the details in the story are authentic to his observance including the threat of wind-carried disease, prophetic encounters with an aging queen and his Tadzio; attracted partly because of his own sexual preference; drawn to it partly because so many intellectuals were pushing him to film it -- can't you just ear the ivy leaguers sighing, "Oh, Luchino, it's my story!" -- and attracted partly, if not largely, to it because of his aristocratic iciness, Visconti's as good a choice as any to make a movie of Mann's frost-nipped melodrama about proscriptions neith probably ever considered justified. They both knew how to give you a case of the chills about sexual heat.
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