Word: viscontis
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Actress Greta Garbo has rarely been photographed in the past 30 years. Though Film Director Luchino Visconti has been trying for months to coax her into looking into the cameras as the Queen of Naples in a new film, Garbo has not said yes. On the other hand, she has not said no. Actually, she has said nothing at all-only taken a plane to Nice and tried to dodge a waiting photographer. Unsuccessfully, for a change...
Those events would be difficult to render in the best of cinematic circumstances. Director Visconti provides the worst. Mann is 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...
Most important, Mann's treatment of the unconsummated affair of man and boy was a metaphor for Europe's decaying society. But Visconti takes the veneer and calls it furniture. With infinite tedium, he pores 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...
Beneath the Images. It must be acknowledged that even at his worst, Visconti remains a master of surfaces. The city's astonishing Adriatic streets, its gleaming planes and squares have never been so lovingly rendered. The epoch, with beautiful women haloed by immense hats and men elegantly attired merely for a saunter through the palm court, is flawlessly but tediously recreated. Still, there is no substance beneath the moving images. Adolescent Bjorn Andresen is properly androgenous but no more mysterious than a lump of sugar. Dirk Bogarde is miscast and misdirected-all hurt looks and empty cackle. The prize...
...corrupt and distorted. It is one thing to change an author's lines or his characters. It is quite another to destroy his soul. Mann's Death in Venice is, in fact, no more about homosexuality than Kafka's The Metamorphosis is about entomology. Visconti's poshlost may aspire to tragedy, but it does not even achieve melancholia; it is irredeemably, unforgivably...