The book is better
Added 10/6/2009
I think the film is too etherial in its approach to the subject..and avoids the real pathos....Bogarde is too young for the role...and his makeup was distracting....Alec Guiness would have been perfect...Noble but tragic..
0 out of 1 people found this helpful.
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A Slow But Satisfying Story
Added 9/2/2009
They don't make many movies like this anymore. The pace is very, very languid and the action is strictly limited. By utilizing this technique, the film gradually connects you with the point of view of the main character, played by Dirk Bogarde.
As he ever so slowly realizes that he is developing an attraction to a beautiful teenage boy, the audience understands what a revelation this awakening is. This man once had a wife and child back in Germany but now he is vacationing alone in decadent, decaying Venice and he is learning that his heart has a strange nature that is a surprise to him.
Is this a love story? Not really. It is a tale of uneasy self-discovery. Anyone who has ever found their life taking a very unexpected turn due to a very unexpected passion should be able to respond to the quite haunting imagery that illuminates "Death In Venice."
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Sometimes you don't need a Plot
Added 5/23/2009
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!
0 out of 0 people found this helpful.
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The search for beauty can lead to death.
Added 5/10/2009
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.
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The Death of Western Civilization
Added 3/7/2009
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.
1 out of 1 people found this helpful.
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The book is better
Added 10/6/2009
I think the film is too etherial in its approach to the subject..and avoids the real pathos....Bogarde is too young for the role...and his makeup was distracting....Alec Guiness would have been perfect...Noble but tragic..
0 out of 1 people found this helpful.
|
A Slow But Satisfying Story
Added 9/2/2009
They don't make many movies like this anymore. The pace is very, very languid and the action is strictly limited. By utilizing this technique, the film gradually connects you with the point of view of the main character, played by Dirk Bogarde.
As he ever so slowly realizes that he is developing an attraction to a beautiful teenage boy, the audience understands what a revelation this awakening is. This man once had a wife and child back in Germany but now he is vacationing alone in decadent, decaying Venice and he is learning that his heart has a strange nature that is a surprise to him.
Is this a love story? Not really. It is a tale of uneasy self-discovery. Anyone who has ever found their life taking a very unexpected turn due to a very unexpected passion should be able to respond to the quite haunting imagery that illuminates "Death In Venice."
0 out of 0 people found this helpful.
|
Sometimes you don't need a Plot
Added 5/23/2009
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!
0 out of 0 people found this helpful.
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