‘Death in Venice’ or — Dye Laughing?

I once described the experience of watching Luchino Visconti’s ‘Death in Venice’ (1971) as being exactly the same as looking at one of those bloody god-awful Jack Vettriano biscuit tins for two hours whilst listening to Classic F.M., and after watching it again for the first time in years last night I still stand by that statement. God, this movie is silly and dull.

We all know the story — Gustav von Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde) is a classical composer who has a bad gig and so comes to Venice to get away from it all but ends up being attracted to a young boy, loses his luggage and then dies on the beach during a tragic Grecian 2000 failure. It’s a slight, and very silly, tale seen through the eyes of a director who once saw human beings as living, breathing creatures but who now views them as nothing more than automated wedding cake figurines meaning ‘Death in Venice’ is often like watching a particularly depressing episode of ‘Trumpton’ set to Mahler.

Of course the big question regarding ‘Death in Venice’ is — “Just how boring is it?”, to which the answer is — “So dull you wouldn’t fucking believe it!” This is easily one of the most tedious movies ever made, especially as the film takes the distasteful and preening posture of not so much expecting the audience to watch it than waiting for us to get on our knees and genuflect before it. Fuck you, movie!

Naturally all this boredom meant my brain had plenty of time to think up flippant questions regarding this travesty. Questions such as — exactly how bad was Gustav’s music anyway that it outraged the classical music world so much? We never get to hear any of it, only swathes of Mahler which he obviously didn’t write, so it’s left to our imaginations to fill it all in (I liked to imagine his piece was titled ‘Themes and Variations on I’ve Got a Brand New Combined Harvester in D Minor’).

Although the most baffling question, BY FAR, is — just what the hell were Bogarde and Visconti’s thought processes regarding the acting decisions during this movie? I mean, this might be one of the most utterly bewildering performances I’ve ever seen in my life so I found myself frequently sitting there, looking at Bogarde on screen and thinking “What the hell are you doing?!”

For example — there’s a moment where Tadzio shoots Gustav a look which Gustav takes as a flirtation. Yet his response is so ludicrously over the top that it would have been MORE subtle if Visconti had cast Sid James and simply told him to go “Phwoar!!” for ten minutes. Although it’s towards the end that Bogarde really seems to lose it to the point where I felt I wasn’t so much watching Aschenbach breaking down but that it was the very film itself that was falling apart before my eyes.

You see, this is what happens when you take all this adolescent, transcendental, solipsistic, fully-enclosed, suffocating, male narcissistic nonsense seriously. And especially the Mahler. At least Ken Russell had the sense to know that when dealing with Mahler you need to keep a little twinkle in your eye as it’s a trap to play it completely straight. Visconti, however, does EXACTLY that, uses the composer’s music to elevate his work into the realm of the transcendent, misses by a fucking mile and renders both his own movie and the music of Mahler into total and irredeemable kitsch in the process. What an idiot!

So ‘Death in Venice’ has issues, right? Oh god yes, and plenty of them, although I can’t imagine anyone staying awake through the movie long enough to discover what they actually are and, besides, it’s hard to get indignant at something when its main effect on you is making you want to take a nap. It’s like exploding with rage at a mug of Horlicks.

Needless to say that after an hour of this I was the one wishing I was dying of cholera.

But then something surprising (actually, more like a fucking miracle) happened — around an hour and twenty minutes in I started to get into it. Yeah, I know! This is because ‘Death in Venice’, for all its flaws, does do a few, undeniable things right. It has a carefully constructed story, the cinematography is great, Venice truly looks like a city in decay, there’s some meticulous waiter action (although Visconti always loved to film the staff, for some unfathomable reason) and for all the distasteful nature of it all there’s some interest in how Visconti expertly plays with time and shifting psychological states. There’s also an excellent shot of Bogarde walking away from camera and into the night, clasping his hands about himself so all we see is a lonely man struggling with the impossibility of attempting to hug himself, becoming nothing more than a pair of disembodied hands round a void in doing so.

So there are pleasures to be had here, but you have to pay absolute attention to find them meaning that ‘Death in Venice’ is both boring AND hard work at the same time and often what you find wasn’t worth the effort in the first place. Besides, the film is still too daft to be taken seriously and so extravagantly stodgy, dense and rich that watching it is like having Christmas cake rubbed into your eyes, and just as annoying.

So what’s it all about? I think a possible answer might revolve around the use and placement of cameras within the film. Notice when they appear during the movie, where they are pointing and how Tadzio never enters their field of view. I suspect this is to emphasise that the young boy is living life fully in reality, that he exists outside of any capturing, fossilising gaze. Gustav, meanwhile, only observes; he doesn’t live. Instead his mind melts into the liquid black of death. It’s a spectacularly depressing, and inadvertently hilarious ending which seems to be suggest we need to live our lives in the here and now because that’s all there is. But do we really need two hours to be told pretty much the same thing the opening credits of the kid’s TV show ‘Why Don’t You…?’ did in fifteen seconds?

Does ‘Death in Venice’ reveal anything profound about the human condition? Not really, because Visconti would have to be dealing with actual human beings for that to be the case. So what does it reveal? Ultimately what’s been lurking there in Visconti films all along — a vast, glimmering ocean of infinite and tedious chintz.