Heartsick and masterful. I do concur with an annoyance in Visconti's love of the zoom, and (much less so) a few slightly tiresome sequences.

Visconti's films are always a visual joy, and this is no exception. Not as lush as The Leopard, DiV offers a grittier, claustrophobic vision of Venice that never fails to engage the eye. That said, the film's beauty remains distant and cool, akin to the role of a quiet observer rather than a participant in the action. I suspect that was exactly what Visconti was going for, but the approach, in turn, leaves me a bit distant toward the film in the final analysis.

187

_Boring? _Yes, at times. _Homossexual, pedo? _Maybe. _Beautiful??? _Certainly! The human neverending pursuit of "The beauty". Outstanding.

Beautiful, melancholic film.

A film about a sick music proffesor going to rest in Venice. This man is unlikeable, uninteresting, snobbish, arrogant and pretentious. Or in short - boring and annoying. Oh, and also a pedophile. Also there's no story. Watching this is basically waiting two hours for the bastard to die, which seems to be the only thing that could end our mutual suffering. A great performance from Bogarde and the music from Mahler saves it from a complete disaster.

#190

hey, wanna see a gay book getting fucked in the ass by long lenses and repeated nauseating zooms? Sure, but hey - nice symbolic motifs, though! In fact, making Aschenbach a composer instead of a poet(like the book), and let the music(along with close-ups) serve as emotional cues is pretty clever. Some of the more understated themes come across brilliantly - oh, if hadn't been for those damn lenses..

A slow moving period piece, at times it feels like it isn't going anywhere. What it lacks in story it makes up for with an incredible emotional performance by Bogarde who makes us sympathize with a character who could easily be unlikeable. Visconti's beautiful work with the camera helps in this regard as well, using zooms and pans to draw us into the situation and giving us wonderful scenery to look at.

This adaptation of a novella is exemplary in that it doesn't pretend to be a carbon copy of the book. It's a Visconti, not a Mann. Not only does Visconti replace the writer protagonist with a composer based on Europe-period Mahler (whose music adorns the soundtrack), but the film is so very cinematic, a gripping audio-visual experience in adagio tempo. Despite the sparsity of the dialog, the film is full of ambiguous meaning; psychological, social, historical, philosophical and otherwise.

# 207

It's very rare to find a film where the picture serves the soundtrack, and not vice versa, but here that's the case, and with Mahler's gorgeous symphonies it's quite appropriate. It's only too bad the script is so weak and it loses some of the emotional punch because there's no real story to be connected to. Still, Dirk Bogarde's strong performance makes up partly for it and he makes us sympathize even with a character we barely know. Sure, it's a limited film, but sort of a flawed masterpiece.

There are no particular flaws nagging at me, I could even make a case for its greatness. But I didn't connect with it on any level and the whole thing just kind of washed over me. The only thing I wanted to note was that there seemed to be an inordinate amount of zooming going on. Otherwise, I've got nothing much to say. It was poignant and well-executed, and the theme of an artist failing to acheive beauty was a little bit interesting, but I also have to say I was kinda bored most of the time.

This is not easy to adapt, but I couldn't imagine anyone doing a more competent job than Visconti does here. The novel is very internalized, so to overcome that hurdle, Visconti switched Gustav's art from writing to composition, since music is more externalized, and adds a few conversations that help to communicate the novel's themes. It all works very nicely. This is excellent in other regards as well; Visconti's eye for period detail is unsurpassed, and this is a gorgeously shot film.

Disturbing film.