Death in Venice (Luchino Visconti, 1971)

Dirk Bogarde reminds me here of no contemporary actor so much as Kevin Eldon (and I say that as the highest compliment to them both; I would love to see Eldon take on a substantial non-comic role like this). For the most part Bogarde stays just the right side of excess, the histrionics part of the character's own self-admiring sense of restraint. Some points that I felt were overstepped in fact later create interesting patterns. The smile indicating Aschenbach's pleasure at the fact that his misdirected luggage compels him to stay in Venice seemed too explicit (compare the deadpan manner in which the closure of the telegraph office is handled in Tourneur's Out of the Past), but then this smile is echoed in another smile when it is finally confirmed that cholera is in Venice, and the wish for death is wholly apparent to us and yet, we feel, not quite apparent to the character. Generally, however, the first half of the film feels much stronger to me than the second. By the end we are both wholly outside and wholly inside the dying Aschenbach. The violent constrast between his vision of Tadzio against the setting sun and his own grotesquely disintegrating face – hair dye running down his cheeks – compares unfavourably to what I remember as the quietly inexorable slipping away of the novella, in which the delusion is still palpable, but much more delicately. Visconti does manage something similar in the earlier scenes of isolation in the hotel. The baroquely 1970s use of camera movement and the zoom lens might recall Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, four years later – with Marisa Berenson the direct link between the two films – but there is nothing of Kubrick's inscrutably irony here. Visconti instead uses the way the camera searches, but does not always underline what it is searching for, and the way the zoom flattens space (allowing him to play games with the contrast between mental and spatial proximity) to inhabit Aschebach's mindset without putting the viewer securely either within or without it. We might, in fact, be closer to another Venetian film that uses similar techniques, namely Nicholas Roeg's Don't Look Now, which both observes and replicates Donald Sutherland's psyche. (The most explicit points of similarity occur, however, in the later sections of Death in Venice, as Aschenbach pursues Tadzio through increasingly phantamagoric and death-ridden streets.) Alternatively, one might even make a comparison with Robert Altman, with Visconti's productive use of the difficult-to-hear another point of contact (half-heard dialogue overlaps in a panoply of languages). Aschenbach feels himself, like Marlowe in The Long Goodbye (also, like Don't Look Now, from 1973), to exist out of his time, divorced from sympathy with or understanding from his surroundings. But whereas Altman indicates that Marlowe is largely correct, Visconti shows us that this is precisely Aschenbach's vain delusion; he is in fact very much a man of his time, as the parade of almost-doppelgängers (the photographer on the beach; the man in front of him in the bureau de change) makes clear.