Word: tonio
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...bourgeois," she tells him. "Yes," he murmurs sententiously, "a bourgeois lost in the arts, an artist with a troubled conscience." The story peters out with Tonio in Denmark, daydreaming on the beach about blonde Inges and brunette Lisavetas, and a life of lonely reverie. He is trapped, he thinks, "between sanctity and lust...
...movie, based on an autobiographical short story by Thomas Mann, is a boy with a 19th century-style identity crisis. Father is a rich and rigid businessman of the North; Mother is a warm-blooded romantic from the South who plays the mandolin and could hardly care less that Tonio fritters away his time writing bad poems and getting bad marks at school. Tonio appreciates this permissiveness but disapproves of it; his father's strictness seems more dignified: "After all, we are not gypsies living in a green wagon...
...Tonio (Jean-Claude Brialy) agonizes deliciously over his unrequited love for blue-eyed Inge, the cool blonde of his dancing-school class. Dark-eyed Lisaveta (Nadja Tiller), an art student whom he visits on a poetry-writing trip to Italy, is far more responsive. But Lisaveta's bohemian ways repel him; when she invites him to a costume ball, he politely refuses and dozes on her sofa while he waits for her to come home...
...likely to be caught between boredom and sleep. Director Rolf Thiele seems to have been trying to make like Ingmar Bergman, with his period costumes, penumbral lighting, and self-conscious composition of every frame. But style is no substitute for substance. Most of what made the original story compelling-Tonio's long, self-probing speeches to Lisaveta and his conception of the writing man as both artist and bourgeois, free spirit and square-has been so compressed and truncated that it is lost in the snail's-pace atmosphere of the film. The result, unfortunately...