With two translations of Death in Venice under my belt, I thought it might be time to have a look at Luchino Visconti's movie version. I was hopeful. Luchino Visconti obviously had a penchant for literature--his other movies included Boccaccio '70 and The Stranger. And while I wasn't overly familiar with Dirk Bogarde . . . I think Rope is the only one of his movies I'd seen . . . he looked suitably Gustav von Aschenbach-y to me:
And the young (16) Swede that they got to play Tadzio (Björn Andrésen) looked like he could be an Object of Forbidden Desire for an old German writer who was going through a thing:
But 45 minutes into the movie and I was already sure that we were in trouble. The director seemed to think that this story was about the basic plot of the novella, so the movie was the story of a middle-aged German composer (yeah, we'll come back to that) who goes to Venice for a vacation and sees a beautiful young boy who he then becomes obsessed with. Kind of a homosexualized version of Lolita. (Speaking of which, Mann's novella precedes Nabokov's novel by 43 years, and is bolder and richer. And less perverse as well, since it isn't actually about pedophilia.) There is some token effort to enrich the narrative with flashback scenes in which Aschenbach argues with a fellow composer (and friend?) named Alfred, but there are two problems there: (1) they are always yelling at each other, which is more than a little bit tiresome, and (2) instead of adapting Mann's narration to the screenplay, Visconti and his co-writer, Nicola Badalucco, insert their own inferior (and often insipid) thoughts about art and music and etcetera into the two characters's mouths. And speaking of music . . . turning Aschenbach into a composer instead of a writer is absolutely unnecessary. More than that, it's stupid. Mann wrote a story about a writer who was searching for Beauty. A writer who wanted to capture that Beauty in his work. * It was not about wanting to fuck a fourteen year old boy. And there are soooooo many scenes in which Dirk Bogarde gives Björn Andrésen the eye, and they smile at each other coyly, and blah blah blah. It has all of the sexual tension of a diced carrot.
So no, you do not need to see this movie. And yes, I wish that I could get those 130 minutes of my life back so that I could put them to better use. But hell, who am I kidding? I'd probably just spend them watching Mika Brzezinski on Morning Joe. (Rrrrrrrrrrrrr, Mika.)
* Speaking of which, I was reading my third translation of Death in Venice (by H.T. Lowe-Porter) and came across these lines:
"His eyes took in the proud bearing of that figure there at the blue water's edge; with an outburst of rapture he told himself that what he saw was beauty's very essence; form as divine thought, the single and pure perfection which resides in the mind, of which an image and likeness, rare and holy, was here raised up for adoration."
Contrast that with the first time that Humbert Humbert sees Lolita, wherein he immediately sees her only as a sexual object.
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