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.
