Visconti’s most famous film, Death in Venice is suffused with the director’s own intimations of mortality. In the burnished images of Venice, the precise, tormented performance of Dirk Bogarde, and the rapturous surge of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, Visconti inscribed his own sense of erotic longing and impending end. Bogarde, dressed to look like Mahler, plays Gustav von Aschenbach, a composer who comes to Venice to spend his final days. Amidst the splendour and decay of the Adriatic city, he becomes transfixed by the pure beauty of a young Polish boy, who is on vacation with his parents. The boy’s radiance stirs in the composer an ardour and sensuality he has long repressed. Based on the Thomas Mann novella, Death in Venice has been cited as “one of the greatest films since the war” (Dilys Powell).
Rated PG.
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