Death In Venice
Italy, 1971
Director: Luchino Visconti
Stars: Dirk Bogarde, Bjorn Andresen, Marisa Berenson
Our Rating: (see more films with this rating)

One of my favourite quotes about gay life comes from Italian director Luchino Visconti, who said that

"When [he] was young, homosexuality was a forbidden fruit, something special, a fruit to be gathered with care, not what it is today – hundreds of homosexuals showing off, dancing together in a gay bar."

It’s a sharp thought and one I’ve always agreed with, but he takes it too far in Death In Venice, and it destroys the film.

Homosexual attraction in Death In Venice is such an isolated, intellectual quest that it has no carnality, and becomes something like a mania or temporary fever-induced mental attack. Because it is directed at an under-age boy, it has a Roman and an illicit flavour, and because the older man is ill and in a state of violent physical degeneration there’s a sickly air of pre-AIDS over the whole thing.

While the film has been praised for its lilting, languid beauty, it’s also rather boring. Instead of a desire-driven narrative, we get endless dreamy looks, and the occasional cascading tear. Biased too much towards the non-sexual side of sexuality, the film topples over, and falls out of enjoyability.



Another big mistake is the casting of Bjorn Andresen as Tadzio, Thomas Mann’s amazing celestial beauty. A shaggy-haired cross between the young Jodie Foster and the present-day Michael Jackson, Tadzio/Andresen does nothing for me, and only makes Bogarde's Gustave seem weirder and more tragic than he already does. If the actor had been a little boyish, maybe even on the verge of being a little manly, at least we could have allocated some kind of sexuality to Gustave, and empathised a little, rather than trying to make sense of his intangible, creeping, cerebral desire for a youth in possession of a penis and an anus.

Very dated and paced like clotted cream, Death In Venice is too introverted and delicate for its own good. Watching the film is a little like washing out an old lace doily – interesting briefly, but quickly a chore. In its favour, it features another good gay performance from Dirk Bogarde (Victim) and is a valuable artefact from the lush, theatrical, autocratic gay golden age that was, at the time of the film’s production, facing its end. Dowagers at high tea, social graces and a dandy composer hero lusting after a beautiful youth – this is the kind of film Oscar Wilde may have made if he’d been born fifty years later, and hadn’t been good with words.

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