Death in Venice

Saw Death in Venice, the pathetic tale of an ageing composer who falls in love with Tadzio, a boy several decades younger than him. In the original book the boy is 14 or so but in this film he is a slightly safer 16. Icky issues aside, the film is really centrally about failing to age well and dying. The protagonist is vacationing in Venice for the sake of his health and to work on some music. He holds the philosophical position that all art is labour (not inspiration) and his failing health is therefore directly responsible for his failing popularity. Tadzio symbolizes both his lost vitality and his lost childhood. He struggles to reclaim these pieces of his past but is intelligent enough to know that Tadzio is not really these things.

He is clearly destructively infatuated with Tadzio but cannot tear himself away. Too weak to leave the object of his desire and too proud to surrender to his fascination and talk to the boy, he resorts to an ever more creepy stalking and skulking. This parallels his relationship to his lost art. He can neither retire, nor can he break out in a new direction. Through flashback we see his creative straightjacket described (in insufferably shouty discussions with a fellow artist. Apparently what artists do mostly is Shout! About! ART!) where compromise is seen as weakness. There is a beautiful scene where Tadzio walks on the beach, wrapped in a towel like a Greek statue while the protagonist composes and we hear the opera singer in his head. This is the best that can happen for the poor composer but it leaves him unsatisfied.

He suffers further degradations relating to his one-sided pursuit of Tadzio and therefore to his vanishing youth. There's an ominous early scene where the composer recoils in disgust at a man with dyed hair and makeup, grotesquely trying to remain young, but by the end the composer himself is painting his hair and powdering his face. When he dies, his hair is ludicrously dripping black onto his face. Through his creepy pursuits, Tadzio becomes aware of the composer and often, when the composer is stalking/tailing him, he turns back with a placid, inscrutable expression. This frustrating lack of response is the primary engine that drives audience interest. Will they ever have closure? I was endlessly frustrated wishing that he'd just talk to Tadzio already. Probably by discovering that the idol was mere flesh and blood would have broken the spell. Instead the nostalgic obsession is left to fester and metastasize.

The film is chilly, sad, haunting and frustrating. It's primarily pathetic, as we watch an old letch slowly loose all of his dreams and his dignity. The film is ambiguous too about Tadzio. His role is primarily to act as inscrutable focal point of the composer's desires, but the exact nature of those desires is never explicitly spelled out and the audience must be content with informed guesses. There are no answers here, only problems.