Aristocracy at the Beach

I just now got done watching a Death in Venice, and I will write this paragraph while I am fresh from the viewing and the iron is hot.

I initially picked this movie up at school when I saw it on one of the check out racks for Film Kids. I knew the name; it had been floating in my collective unconsciousness probably since I was kid, most undoubtedly heard from my mother. So I checked it out among some other picks and today sat down and watched it.

And what a fucking movie, man was it long. I don’t think the run time was as long as it felt. The pace was slow and deliberate. Shots were fixed and long, with slow zooms to highlight something in the scene. The music was in a constant state of swell when there wasn’t absolute silence, and then let us not forget the rich people at the dinner parties, on the gondoliers, and of course at the beach.

I am getting ahead of myself, so let me start again. The movie centers on a German composer with a bad heart who goes to turn of century Venice for rest. He is very uptight and detached from everyone around him, insisting on his way everywhere he goes. He pays no mind to his expenses as he walks aimlessly around the city. It is here he also develops a fixation on a young polish boy who is visiting with his family, and who seems to be in the same place at the same time as the composer.

This is where the movie is vague, and refreshingly so. The fixation in question is not homosexual; they establish the man’s sexual preferences well throughout the movie in flashbacks. They don’t explain much of anything; instead they give the raw materials of this man’s life and let you decide what it all meant.

The movie really isn’t to interested in holding your hand and walking you through a conventional narrative, instead it gives you long quiet shots, and sometimes not so quiet, of Venice and its people. How Cholera ravaged the city and how city officials hushed it up to save their fledgling tourist business. The look of the boats as they drift on the glassy water at sunrise. The tourists as they go about their days socializing on the beach with friends and family, and then retreat to the hotel at night for music and fine dining. The bitter and contemptuous locals, suffering from dirges of poverty and disease.

Dirk Bogarde does a damn good job at putting across the level of alienation of Gustav (the composer). He is afflicted not only with a terminal heart condition, but complete estrangment with just about everything around him.

I will stop there. This was a good movie, and I say that because while I didn’t feel moved to tears or sucked into it in the least, my viewing was very interesting. My friend Chris said something the other day that seems fitting for this: “Nowadays if people don’t understand it, they don’t like it.” I didn’t understand it, but that’s why I liked it. It felt impenetrable in way, because at the end the composer dies (trust me its not a surprise, I didn’t spoil it) and the information you received would ultimately be the only info you would ever receive, and you could never know this man completely or the motives for his actions. It leaves you wondering how he got to where he was and what the boy means to him. This movie is challenging in that way.

I recommend it if you have time to sit down and just watch.