Word: aschenbach
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Director Richard Kwietniowski, adapting Gilbert Adair's novel, uses Priestley's fretful blankness to handsome comic effect. But Hurt is the big news here. Dignified and dithery, he makes Giles one of the most charming predators in ages. Like Von Aschenbach in Death in Venice, like Lolita's Humbert Humbert, he is a man of culture finding beauty in youth, in coarseness--in "all that I myself have never been." To Giles, ecstasy comes in small packages. For viewers, this film is one of them...
...fiction must be provided with the most realistic of foundations. This was an article of faith with Mann from the outset of his career." And where was he to find those foundations? In the lives of his colleagues and contemporaries, no matter how vulnerable they were; art was everything. Aschenbach, the enfeebled aesthete of Death in Venice (1913), for example, was modeled after Gustav Mahler, who was dying at the time. "Nothing is invented in [the story]," Mann boasted,as if the confession added to his stature as an artist...
...Broken Clown. In his film adaptation, Luchino Visconti (The Damned) pays his utmost disrespect to the original by maintaining Mann's fustian and removing his intention. In the novella, the aging Author-Philosopher Gustave Aschenbach seeks renewal in Venice. But like the fugitive with an appointment in Samarra, he finds death awaiting him. An elusive and beautiful youth, Tadzio, attracts the writer. Though he never touches his beloved, never even speaks to him. Aschenbach is rendered immobile by his platonic affair. A plague of cholera racks the city. At any time the writer is free to leave...
...supposed to have based his hero on Gustav Mahler. So Visconti, ruthlessly deleting Mann's imagination, makes the neoclassic author a Romantic musician-accompanied by plaintive strains of Mahler's Fifth Symphony, emphasized until it becomes as banal as the theme from Love Story. Mann's Aschenbach was a harrowed spent figure with a dead wife and a grown daughter. Visconti's is played by Dirk Bogarde, a man barely into middle age. Accordingly, he is equipped, like Mahler, with a young wife and a deceased child...
...over every facet of Tadzio's Botticelli visage; with stupid distortion, he makes the boy, played by Bjorn Andresen, a flirt whose eyes flash a come-on to his helpless elder, like some midnight cowboy off the Via Veneto. He even concocts an elaborate bordello scene in which Aschenbach is shown as a heterosexual failure-a moment that proves as barren of meaning as it is of style...