Death in Venice [Morte a Venezia] ***** (1971, Dirk Bogarde, Björn Andrésen, Silvana Mangano, Romolo Valli, Mark Burns, Marisa Berenson) – Classic Film Rview 607

Dirk Bogarde’s extraordinary tour-de-force as an ageing German avant-garde composer Gustav von Aschenbach is the jewel in the crown of Luchino Visconti’s masterly 1971 film adaptation of the Thomas Mann novella Death in Venice. In the book, Aschenbach is an author, but Bogarde’s character is loosely based on the distinguished composer/ conductor Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) and the actor takes his appearance and details in the film from Mahler too.

Come to a turn-of-the-last-century Venetian seaside resort around 1900 to find rest and quiet at a time of artistic and personal stress, Aschenbach finds no peace at all. Instead he is quickly caught up in his troubling passion for an androgynously beautiful adolescent Polish boy, Tadzio (Bjorn Andresen, then 16), on holiday with his mother (Silvana Mangano) and family.

The youth embodies an ideal of beauty that Aschenbach has long sought and he becomes totally infatuated. However, the onset of deadly cholera threatens everything and everybody, and they must leave or die. Tadzio seems like an angel, but maybe he is the angel of death, summoning Aschenbach to his doom by somehow compelling him to stay in Venice, where he knows he must die. In the era of Covid, the film has achieved an awful urgency.

Apart from Andresen and Mangano, Bogarde’s other remarkable co-stars are Venice itself and the highly emotional Adagietto from Gustav Mahler’s 5th Symphony, which along with the 3rd was adapted as background music for the film. Pasquale de Santis’s gorgeous cinematography and art director Ferdinando Scarfiotti’s glorious production designs convince you that no one would possibly want to leave Venice.

Location filming took place at Piazza San Marco [St Marks’ Square], the Grand Hotel des Bains and the beach at Venice Lido and the alleyways behind the La Fenice Opera House and the Campiello dei Calegheri, with the studio work at Cinecittà Studios in Rome. The bank is the Banca Commerciale Italiana, in the northeast corner of Piazza San Marco. The flashbacks to von Aschenbach’s marriage were filmed in a plum orchard 100 miles northwest of Venice at Bolzano in the Dolomites.

The Hotel des Bains can also be seen as the ‘Cairo’ hotel in Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient.

Is it just a romantic, almost novelettish, tragic gay love story or a profound portrait of the artist as an old man and his inevitably doomed life, or the plague-destroyed quest after unattainable beauty and perfection? Or all of them? Any which way, Visconti and Bogarde have come up with one of the cinema’s masterworks.

Shamefully, only the superb costume design by Piero Tosi was even Oscar nominated and then didn’t win. It did win four Bafta awards though, for Best Cinematography (Pasqualino De Santis), Best Art Direction (Ferdinando Scarfiotti), Best Costume Design (Piero Tosi) and Sound Track (Vittorio Trentino, Giuseppe Muratori). Bogarde was surprisingly overlooked at the Baftas for Best Actor and so was Visconti for Best Direction.

Paid only $5,000, Andrésen is dubbed, since the Swedish actor was playing a Polish character. Bogarde received 100 times that amount. It took nearly a billion lire in old money at the Italian box office and was a worldwide success.

Andrésen lives in Stockholm and has a daughter Robine and an ex-wife, Susana Roman. ‘My career is one of the few that started at the absolute top and then worked its way down,’ he says. ‘That was lonely.’ He’s still working and was in the TV series Wallender in 2010, in the TV Mini-Series Gentlemen & Gangsters (2016) and Midsommar (2019).

HIs story is told in the 2021 documentary The Most Beautiful Boy in the World.

Benjamin Britten was no doubt inspired to write his last opera Death in Venice in 1973 after seeing the movie.

Ken Russell made an extravagantly zesty biopic of the composer in 1973, Mahler, with Robert Powell.

Also in the cast are Marisa Berenson, Mark Burns, Romolo Valli, Nora Ricci, Carol André, Leslie French, Franco Fabrizi, Luigi Battaglia, Antonio Appicella, Sergio Garfagnoli, Ciro Cristofoletti and Dominique Darel.

Piero Tosi (1927–2019).

Piero Tosi, the famed costume designer who worked on films such as The Leopard, Death in Venice, The Night Porter, L’Innocente and Lady of the Camelias (1981), died on 10 August 2019 in Rome, aged 92. He was nominated for five Oscars: for The Leopard [Il gattopardo] (1963), Death in Venice [Morte a Venezia] (1971), Ludwig (1973), La Cage aux Folles (1978) and La Traviata (1982). A 2014 Honorary Award went to Piero Tosi, ‘a visionary whose incomparable costume designs shaped timeless, living art in motion pictures.’