Word: tadzio
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...also there to recuperate from several emotional traumas, including his sense of failure as an artist and the grief he experienced from his daughter's death. We observe the luxuries and pleasures of Venetian life through his eyes. The man is consumed by aesthetic pleasure for a young boy, Tadzio, whose youthful beauty is matched by the finery of his beautiful mother and siblings. The man's homosexual love is the beginning of his fated exploration into his identity as an artist. News of the coming of a plague, which threatens to blockade the city and trap the vacationers, foreshadows...
...camera is also used to create painted images in later scenes, which focus upon the man's absorption in Tadzio's beauty. When the little boy and his family are praying in church, the camera stops to frame his face by the candles and the alter. The result is that we don't feel that we are gazing at a photographic image, but at a painting. This in turn symbolically suggests that art and its effect upon the beholder creates its own kind of reality...
...film often moves slowly, as there are prolonged scenes of Tadzio rambling on the beach or the man's boat crossings. The immersion in nature and the prolonged shots of the characters' facial features can be overwhelming, although they do serve to show the nature of his disturbing obsession. The mood is created more through symbolism and the cinematographic artistry than through the dynamism or interpersonal contact among the characters, who maintain caricature-like personas...
Much of that disintegration takes place as he watches his beloved Tadzio dance on the beach. The Royal Ballet's 19-year-old Robert Huguenin (who, true to the novella, never speaks) is sinuous without being sickly sensual. This restraint probably errs in the excessively angular choreography Sir Frederick Ashton has designed for the cavorting boys on the beach. Yet it is an effective use of ballet as a symbolic vehicle...
...other major roles include an old fop who presages decay, and a satanic barber who rouges the hero's face for his final and failing encounter with Tadzio. All are emanations of death, and all are sung with a consummate leaven of evil power by another Britten regular, Bass-Baritone John Shirley-Quirk...