Death in
Venice is a sumptuously beautiful Technicolor immersion into
pesilential Venice. Dirk Bogarde gives a lot in his performance as
the isolated composer Gustav von Aschenbach. He is holidaying alone in Venice to recover from the
overwhelming stresses of his life, particularly of being massively
uptight and self-denying, while simultaneously giving of himself
through the committed and considered perfection of his music.
Flashbacks of passionate conversations with a friend spell out
explicitly how we are to interpret the present scenes in Venice.
There is no separation between the man and his music; he expects
perfection of himself, moral purity, and no corruption
through a mere pleasure of the senses. He dreams of a spiritual beauty
that is pure and perfect. And he discovers this in the beautiful
form of a teenage boy he sees in his Venice hotel, holidaying with
his family, the magnificently beautiful Björn
Andérsen. He observes
this boy from afar but does not dare to approach him. Tadzio notices
his attention and is as captivated by his gaze as Gustav is captivated to
gaze upon him. But, as we are so clearly told in the flashback
philosophical conversations, his engagement with life is as a
detached observer.
Bogarde's
performance is excruciating in its precision and commitment to
communicating, through almost no dialogue and often merely sitting alone,
the painful self-loathing expressed as pomposity and cowardice. Gustav is horrified in the beginning to encounter a painted and
flamboyant queen who addresses him on equal terms, as if to a fellow
queen. He does not want to humiliate himself with such shameless
abandon.
Tadzio
plays with his attention and the power it gives him, but Gustav cannot act, cannot place himself on the line, cannot risk to feel so
much, cannot allow himself the potential pleasure promised by
engagement with this beautiful young man fluttering about in front of
him like a butterfly. I suppose this self-loathing and self-denial
speaks to a very specific queer experience that would have been all
too common at the time, and only somewhat less so today. The expression of queer
desire and admiration of beauty is more permissible in Western societies today, but the admiration of the beauty
of adolescent boys, is less permissible perhaps.
Gustav's
struggle is as much present in the languorous gaze of
the camera, its subtle movements and carefully editing, as it is in Bogarde's
performance.
While I
find it unpleasant to identify with Bogarde's character in very
personal and humiliating ways the film remains a work of beauty and
sympathy, with the squalid and dangerous beauty of Venice and the
as-yet-uncorrupted beauty of Tadzio, perhaps equally dangerous.