Death in Venice (dir. Luchino Visconti, 1971)- Review

“The appreciation of this addition to the canon of great art has been expressed by select audiences and critics, in England and the continent, with repeated use of one word. Masterpiece.”

In one ungainly swoop, the studio prose that helped propel Death in Venice to critical and commercial acclaim across the Anglosphere sums up the spirit of the film, a spirit that seemed as profitable in 1971 as it smacks of toxicity now. Death in Venice is a love song to decadence, and a passionately self-indulgent answer to a timeless question: what does pleasure mean?

Luchino Visconti’s particular inquiry into the meaning of life- the question of how anything good can have meaning, with the Grim Reaper lurking round the corner- has found its own aptly twisted and yet somehow meaningful answer. Death in Venice hit the headlines again with the release of The Most Beautiful Boy in The World, a 2021 documentary following the film’s star- Björn Andrésen, cast at 15 as the embodiment of youthful beauty- over six years of his seventh decade. Transformed in not just the mind of Death in Venice’s obsessive artist protagonist, Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde), but for the director and the world, into an iconic object of child-adjacent lust, Andrésen now wishes he could tell Visconti to “fuck off”.

The great irony unfolds in the fact that with the long-due recognition of the person behind the object- the child simultaneously exploited, objectified and belittled for his looks- Death in Venice gains another layer to its argument for decadent art as the most truthful representation of beauty.

Like most works by Thomas Mann, the German writer behind the original story, Death in Venice is horrendously, narcissistically self-indulgent. In the spirit of the comfortably archaic, elitist pre-war idyll that they invoke, Mann’s stories and protagonists (usually a cellophane-veiled version of himself) wrap themselves in the pretension of ‘art’ in an attempt to cushion an uncomfortable, ugly reality. In this case, writer, director, and audiences from Cannes to Japan find themselves caught up in the story’s central conceit: the transcendental, unconscious power of a being whose beauty makes the older, stronger viewer feel weak.

In the face of social collapse- in the pandemic as on the eve of World War I- people often turn to beauty in immediate reality: admiring it, obsessing over it, and most of all trying to find some way of capturing its transience. As a work of ‘art’ in this vein, Death in Venice is distinguished by the fact that its central object has survived to claw back his identity, breaking with the tradition- so effusively indulged by Mann, Visconti, and their predecessors for centuries- of silencing the ‘muse’ under the ‘artist’.

Light on plot and heavy on visuals, Death in Venice follows tormented composer Gustav von Aschenbach (Bogarde), as he arrives at a resort in Venice and becomes obsessed with ethereally beautiful Polish boy, and fellow guest, Tadzio (Andrésen). Notably, Tadzio does not speak. In a skilful translation of Mann’s text- a deluge of fin-de-siecle neurosis that throttles the reader, as well as Aschenbach, with the intricacies of the protagonist’s horny narcissism- Visconti turns to Tadizo/Andrésen’s physical, unthinking attributes to express the story’s central idea.

Aschenbach, like pederasts from Humbert Humbert to Jeffrey Epstein, does not see Tadzio; the story makes clear that he sees an art object, a crystallisation of the ideal of virginal, fleeting beauty, which he imagines flowing from Ancient Greece to the sailor-suited vision at his breakfast table. Visconti lingers on these qualities in Andrésen, just as Aschenbach does on Tadzio, and just as Thomas Mann did on a real Polish boy named Wladyslaw Moes in the summer of 1911. The film sweats to conjure a fraternity amongst these viewers and their audiences: a sense that the fleeting beauty might not be truly lost, thanks to the power of the artist to recognise and transmute it across the centuries. What makes Death in Venice so special is the fact that the object’s latest incarnation is, at last, able to flip the bird to this lineage of self-aggrandising “cultural predators”, on his behalf and on that of his silenced predecessors.

The counterpart of beauty is of course the grotesque; Mann and Visconti alike mine efficiently from the symbolically laden Venetian setting, with the latter dragging composer Gustav Mahler into the soundtrack- and as the basis of Aschenbach!- as an unconsenting but weighty third wheel to this cursed triumvirate of indulgent modernist ‘art’. Poor Mahler: like Mann, he tried to turn the agonies of a life torn between the nineteenth century and World War I to artistic expression, but he died six decades before the film came out, and unlike Mann, he didn’t write a lustfully incestuous diary about his own son. He really doesn’t deserve to be implicated, indeed centralised, in this intergenerational paean to pervy ‘aesthetes’; this member’s club for self-appointed gatekeepers of “artistic vision”, uniting with centuries of Western tradition to turn a beautiful young ‘thing’ into a symbol of the wider change that they alone could perceive and express, with the trappings of age and power.

But that’s the point of Death in Venice: art is grotesque, exploitative, a conscious fusion of the ugly and the titillating that squashes lived reality under the vision of someone who ‘recognises’ it. Together with the film, and even the book, Andrésen’s experience offers a valuable counterpart to the urgency of the #MeToo movement. Exploitation has been embedded in art for centuries: at least Death in Venice, aside from being a visually and dramatically stunning work, carries an inherent and violent reminder of that.