Der Tod in Venedig

One more of the movies that TCM showed when Dirk Bogarde was TCM's Star of the month was Luchino Visconti's Death in Venice, a 1971 adaptation of Thomas Mann's novella. As the book is only a novella, it's a relatively shorter synopsis here. Also, it's been a good 30 years since I read it (in translation although I'd like to think my German is good enough to handle it), so I can't really comment on the differences between the novella and the movie.

The story deals with a writer Gustave von Aschenbach (that's Dirk Bogarde), a widower who needs to get away from the stress of his life in Germany. He plans to go to the Mediterranean for the climate, winding up in Venice. At the hotel, where he dines alone, he sees a family at a table: a mother, several daughters, and an adolescent son (Björn Andrésen) in a sailor suit. Aschenbach considers the boy the apotheosis of the classical Greek standard of beauty.

With that in mind, Aschenbach does what any rational person would do: he starts stalking the family just so he can get glimpses of the boy. He figures out that the family is Polish, and that the boy is probably named Tadeusz, since it sounds like they're referring to him as Tadzio. Aschnebach keeps following the family until the day he dies, which you might have guessed he's going to do considering the title. (I seem to recall the death being mentioned at the beginning of the novella, but again, as I've said, I read it ages ago.)

Another theme in the movie is that, as Aschenbach is following Tadzio around, he sees signs going up in the less touristy parts of Venice in Italian warning the locals and giving Gustav the distinct feeling that there's some sort of epidemic about that the government doesn't want to tell the tourists about lest it destroy that season's tourist trade. He's right, of course, and we can presume it's that disease (likely cholera) that's going to kill Gustave.

I didn't care for the novella, because the main character following Tadzio around is frankly creepy, and not because of the homoeroticism. After all, if it were about an author stalking a girl -- think Lolita -- there would also be a serious creep-out factor involved. As a result, I was hesitant to watch the movie. And I have to admit that I have many of the same problems with the movie that I did with the novella. That's not necessarily the fault of anyone in the movie; it's that the story is one that has natural challenges in making it more palatable. Visconti tries this by turning it into a two-hour affair, with lots of languorous scenes of Venice as it might have looked circa 1910 before it got zillions of tourists of a more modest economic class, and before authorities decided to turn the place into a museum, stopping the rebuilding that was one of the things preventing the city from sinking into the lagoon.

Many of the visuals in Death in Venice are pretty. But for me it wasn't enough to overcome that ugly story.