Directed with wistful melancholy, Death in Venice wants us to sympathize with a snobby pervert. But unlike Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita, the most successful attempt at humanizing this particular kind of creep, director Luchino Visconti has no interest in critiquing his protagonist. Instead, there are long, long stretches where we watch a middle-aged man regard a waifish, borderline androgynous male youth with a mix of lust and agony. Visconti, along with his co-screenwriter Nicola Badalucco, take their source material – the book by Thomas Mann – and rob of it philosophical and character discursions by keeping the action (if you want to call it that) entirely on the surface. This film is not without its pleasures, since arguably no Italian director filmed his homeland with more beauty, and yet the whole endeavor veers into bad taste once you think about the premise for more than a few seconds.
The English actor Dirk Bogarde plays Gustav von Aschenbach, a classical composer who visits Venice in the early twentieth century to convalesce. The character is an author in the original novel, and the switch gives Visconti an excuse to have his interiority expressed through music, not words. Classical music is constant throughout the film, Mahler in particular, a conceit that gives it a veneer of tastefulness that it certainly does not deserve. Images of Gustav’s journey to Venice are gorgeous, with many individual shots recalling classic painters of the city like Canaletto, and the pinkish hues of the sunset can be breathtaking. Has the city ever been more lovingly photographed? All this is a delightful primer, a reassurance that Visconti – the filmmaker who made masterpieces like The Leopard – has yet another on his hands. But then Gustav gets to his hotel.
Like anyone traveling alone, Gustav has an idle curiosity about his fellow travelers. He discreetly looks around, eyeing everyone carefully, then his gaze settles on Tadzio (Björn Andrésen), a Polish boy of about fifteen who is on holiday with his family. Gustav stares at Tadzio for an obscene length – there is no other word for it, really – because he lusts after him. Death in Venice goes through the pretense of suggesting the boy represents some kind of Petrarchan ideal, a human form so perfect that poets and sculptors cannot help but be inspired by him. The trouble is that Gustav has no similar feeling of inspiration: this is not a film about a composer who is jolted into one last surge of creativity. The tone is more elegiac than that, and instead Visconti wants us to consider the poignance in Gustav’s “chaste” obsession. That word is in quotes because it is easy to imagine what Gustav does when he is off-camera, even if Visconti never wants you once to consider it.
Death in Venice some flashbacks that give the material slightly more backstory than the surface of a sad pedophile. There is a long debate between Gustav and his friend Alfred (Mark Burns) about whether beauty is artistic or natural, then we see Gustav with his family, a flashback to a happier time. The implication is that Gustav, the weary solitary traveler, lost his family in some way. Maybe they died in an accident? Maybe his wife found out about Gustav’s sexual predilection for children and bolted? The film declines to give us a complete answer, except that these episodes are on Gustav’s mind when he regards the boy. Tadzio may represent all the youth and beauty that now eludes Gustav, a kind of metaphor that countless middle-aged men undergo, and yet Death in Venice only sees the poignance – not the sleaziness – of his premise.
A plot emerges when Gustav musters enough self-awareness to realize he should not fixate on Tadzio, and attempts to leave Venice. He returns, of course, then his health takes a turn for the worse when a cholera epidemic seizes the city. If this is karmic, Visconti declines to make the connection explicit. Instead, Gustav’s final minutes coincide with him on a beach where Tadzio wrestles with an older boy, along with another pregnant glance from the boy to Gustav that – in his mind and Visconti’s – justifies the lurid gaze. This is the most overtly sexual thing in the film, a kind of physical intimacy that only exists in Gustav’s mind, and so there are images of Gustav going bug-eyed before he collapses in his beach chair. This film would have us believe a sight of pure beauty pushed Gustav beyond his mortal coil, but that would require Visconti’s spell to be effective. A more accurate interpretation would be the sight of a wrestling teenage boy caused a pervert to bust in his pants so hard he expired.
Shortly after its release, Death in Venice received several major accolades. It won BAFTA awards, it was nominated for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and it was on The National Board of Review’s annual list of the year’s best. The early consensus took Visconti at face value, without giving his adaptation the scrutiny it needed (one notable exception was Roger Ebert, who admired some of the film and cannily saw through its pretense). Recently the film was featured on the Criterion Channel, a kind of editorial endorsement, which is how I came to see it. It certainly does deserve its reputation, a borderline reprehensible film that uses gorgeous imagery to mask its “tasteful” consideration of predatory lust. At best, Death in Venice is a minor work by a major filmmaker, the kind of curiosity that only die-hards should explore. Heinous and too dull to be camp, this is the unintentional art house parody that could turn generations of younger, unaware audiences off foreign cinema for the rest of their lives.
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