Death in Venice
by Luchino Visconti
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Actor: Dirk Bogarde, Marisa Berenson, Mark Burns, Nora Ricci, Romolo ValliDirector: Luchino Visconti
Brand: Warner Brothers
Cinematographer: Pasqualino De Santis
Producer: Luchino Visconti
Writer: Luchino Visconti
Producer: Mario Gallo
Producer: Robert Gordon Edwards
Writer: Nicola Badalucco
Writer: Thomas Mann
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Dubbed, DVD-Video, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 130 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2004-02-17
Audience Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: Warner Home Video
DVD Reviews of Death in Venice
DVD Review: Sometimes you don't need a Plot
Summary: 5 Stars
Eightteen years ago I read "Death in Venice" by Thomas Mann. It was one of those books that lost me early on and I found myself turning the pages hoping that something would eventually make sense. I got to the end but no, there wasn't anything that made any sense; just an old man with a fixation on a boy and I wasn't the least bit interested in knowing any more about that. I had noted that the movie version of the book was pretty highly acclaimed so I thought maybe that could help me understand what I didn't understand 18 years ago. I'm glad I decided to rent the movie.
What impressed me from the start was the cinematography, the sets, the costumes, the location, the focus, and so many other visual aspects of the movie (including the endless varieties of women's gigantic hats). There is a main character who, frankly, is not a very endearing focal point. He is short-tempered, anti-social, argumentative, impulsive, demanding and generally uninteresting. He's also in a physically weakened state which we note from a multitude of cinematic suggestions. He goes through this movie with little purpose. We are aware that he is supposed to be recouping in Venice but he isn't cooperating with himself. Early on, he notices a boy of roughly the age of 14 or 15. The boy and his family are staying at the same luxurous hotel so the old man and young boy visually encounter each other frequently. If this sounds rather uninteresting it's because it IS uninteresting. What compelled me in the film was the outstanding manner in which it is all presented. It's as though we, too, were present during all that transpires. The acting is outstanding and "Death in Venice" comes across to me as an example of how excellent supporting actors can elevate a film. Essentially, the lack of any meaningful plot enables us to just lounge around with the other vacationers and take in the surroundings. Serously, there IS no plot to this film; merely a suggestion, if you're the least bit interested, of a dying man stumbling through his final days immersed in solitary emptiness. One light flickers intermittently but all the other bulbs have long ago burnt out. It is sad to see and the magnificent splendor that surrounds all this serves to illuminate this emptiness all the more.
I did not get any more meaning out of the film version of "Death in Venice" than I did out of the book. I'm sure some would say that Mann created a literary picture the equal to Viconti's visual picture but I would disagree. I have never given a movie a "5 Star" rating without it telling me a story that drew me in and stayed with me for days and weeks thereafter. Luchino Visconti's "Death in Venice", for me, is an example of making an outstanding movie out of a meaningless story by bringing all the cinematic arts to a level of excellence. Halfway through the film it occurred to me that I should activate the English subtitles so as to pick up the Italian dialogue that is interspersed with the primarily English dialogue. It added somewhat to the film but I didn't need to go back over what I had already seen; the film spoke to me in its' own language. Indeed, the limited dialoue in "Death in Venice" merely served to clarify what we were already hearing. What a performance by Dirk Bogarde!
DVD Review: The search for beauty can lead to death.
Summary: 5 Stars
Water has been used many times in literature and films as a reference for life, thus Venice would be the ideal place for a movie about being reborn. But director Visconti has decided to present it as the place to go when you are ready to die, especially when you are dying not only of bodily failure, but of artistic failure as well. The search for beauty leads the intellectual man on the road of life, but comes a day when he realizes that it is now unattainable. That final scene, with the young man entering the sea, and raising his arm in the way Micheangelo's Adam stretches his hand to touch God's, was a glorious finale to this film. DVD Review: The Death of Western Civilization
Summary: 4 Stars
Freely adapted from Thomas Mann's novella, "Death in Venice" is a masterpiece of atmosphere and Romantic (if not romantic) longing. The 'plot,' so-called, is a series of mostly fleeting encounters between Gustav von Aschenbach, a widower and composer, and the obscure object of his affection/attention: Tadzio, a Polish adolescent with a Botticelli-like beauty. In flashbacks, we see Aschenbach as a passionate, engaged intellectual arguing for the 'spirituality' of Beauty as an abstract ideal. In the present, he is a broken, isolated man lingering like a mute ghost in a disintegrating city.
Aschenbach's homoerotic fixation on Tadzio is complex. Generally interpreted as unconsummated pedophilic desire, the relationship also be read as a dying man's single-minded pursuit of Beauty as an ideal (Bjorn Andresen's Apollonian distance as Tadzio seems to embody the younger Aschenbach's abstract vision of pure, remote Beauty). Tadzio is not so much an object of desire as an object d'art; the last dream of an old man trying vainly to reclaim the lost ideal of Youth. That's one interpretation among many.
Directed by Luchino Visconti, "Death in Venice" is a tone-poem; an often arrestingly beautiful meditation on youth, obsession, old age, and the decrepit state of Western Civilization. Venice is a dream city of beautiful surfaces and gorgeous architecture, but it is also a crumbling, sinking city that relies on the cannibalization of its past to stay afloat (if you'll pardon the pun). Tourists flock to Venice as to a beautiful ruin. One can't help but wonder if Mann was prophetic in his diagnosis of Western Europe as a decaying body obsessed with its beautiful youth, vainly attempting to keep up appearances. As Hans Urs von Balthasar once wrote, "We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it."
Though Visconti's deliberate pacing may try the viewer's patience, "Death in Venice" is more than worth the effort. The cinematography is often ravishing and Visconti makes masterful use of Gustav Mahler's lush, aching fifth Symphony. The tortured Romance of Mahler's music grants us access to the volcanic passions beneath Aschenbach's meticulously reserved surface -- Aschenbach even resembles Mahler.
Dirk Bogarde gives a careful, fully realized performance as the highly cultured but emotionally stunted Aschenbach. With very little dialogue, he is able to convey Aschenbach's bitterness, misanthropy, loneliness, obsession, and pathetic hope for reciprocated affection through a complex network of looks, expressions, gestures, and body language. (Two of cinema's most expressive, soulful eyes certainly help.) This is one of the loneliest films ever lensed, and Bogarde's performance beautifully empathizes with a man cut-off from the rest of humanity. Despite the leisurely pace, the film builds to a surprisingly emotional climax. The last scene is a tour-de-force; an aria of lost hope, passion, and tragedy.
DVD Review: Bogarde's Only Boring Performance
Summary: 3 Stars
I'm a lifelong Bogarde fan, the kind who will watch anything he's in. He's a marvelously sensitive, intuitive actor, his effects so natural they seem effortless. What's more, he's one of the few actors who, when he's silent on screen, looks as though he's thinking and not as though he forgot his lines. Therefore I was astonished at his bizarre, fidgety performance in *Death In Venice*. In his memoirs, Bogarde has described how Visconti tracked him down and convinced him to play the role. Visconti told Bogarde he had reached the exact degree of preparedness, like a hunting kill hung to the stage of beautiful putrefaction. Well, Bogarde putrifies in this role, but not beautifully. For most of the movie, he's continually full of business, idiosyncratic little quirks and tics that chafe the viewer.All of Bogarde's usual seamless power is lost in this overworked interpretation. Until the last scenes in the film his Aschenbach is too trivial, narcissistic, and dryly self-involved to gain our interest. I think part of the problem is the self-consciousness of his Mahler makeup. (Visconti intended him to look like Mahler.) At this stage in Bogarde's life he had a compelling ruined beauty. This is what his Aschenbach should have looked like.
Having said all this, I have to mention the truly powerful last scenes in which Bogarde, as the dying Aschenbach, regains his stillness and a tragic self-knowledge. He sacrifices his life rather than be separated from an impossible, wildly unseemly love for a person who could never possibly love him back. This is not noble. It's pathetic, ridiculous, repulsive. But Bogarde rises above his Mahler moustache and disastrous obsession to pierce us, in the end, with his pain.
DVD Review: " Don't ever smile like that at anyone, except me "
Summary: 5 Stars
Thomas Mann's controversial novel is the basis for the film "A Death in Venice. " Although in the book, the hero is an author, in the film the director Luchino Visconti who also wrote the screenplay, transforms him into a Composer. As such, the Author/Composer, Gustav Von Aschebach (Dirk Bogarde) on the verge of mental exhaustion is a burned-out artisan. After a long and successful career now seeks the peace and tranquility of a less hectic life. He decides to go on vacation to Venice where he hopes to rejuvenate his dwindling ambition. However, while staying at the picturesque seaside resort, he captures the attention of a beautiful young teenage boy, Tadzio (Bj?rn Andr?sen) who eyes him with curious interest and is immediately smitten by him. Although Gustav is captivated by the wondrous youth, he nevertheless must find some private time away from the boy's governess (Nora Ricci), while having to cope with a invading plague which seems to have infested the city. The movie dialog, like the novel remains subtle as are the few brief encounters between the boy and the artist. In the end. the audience unlike the book is hampered with innuendos and imaginative flights of fancy. Their affair is never given opportunity and if not for the brief resolution in the book, the film allows only the possibility of 'what if.' Nevertheless, one can sympathize with the hero and wish him a moment's peace to obtain that which is forbidden, elusive but definitely criticized by prying eyes. Great story and a Bogarde Classic. ****
Description of Death in Venice
Abroad on a rest holiday, composer Gustav Aschenbach (Dick Bogarde) is to all the world reserved and civilized. But when he glimpses someone who inspires him to give way to a secret passion, it foreshadows his doom. Director Luchino Visconti (Rocco and His Brothers, The Damned) transforms Thomas Mann's classic novel into "a masterwork of power and beauty" (William Wolf, Cue). Like Aschenbach, Visconti is an artist obsessed: his movies are awash in mood, period detail and seething emotions beneath placid surfaces. Earning its maker a Cannes Film Festival Special 25th Anniversary Prize, Death in Venice - with a soundtrack feast of Gustav Mahler music and a haunting Bogarde performance-is Visconti at his best.Luchino Visconti's adaptation of the Thomas Mann novel is the very definition of sumptuous: the costumes and sets, the special geography of Venice, and the breathtaking cinematography combine to form a heady experience. At the center of this gorgeousness is Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde in a meticulous performance), a controlled intellectual who unexpectedly finds himself obsessed by the vision of a 14-year-old boy while on a convalescent vacation in 1911. Visconti has turned Aschenbach into a composer, which accounts for the lush excerpts from Mahler on the soundtrack (Bogarde is meant to look like Mahler, too). Even if it tends to hit the nail on the head a little too forcefully, and even if Visconti can test one's patience with lingering looks at crowds at the beach and hotel dining rooms, Death in Venice creates a lushness rare in movies. For some viewers, that will be enough. --Robert Horton
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