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Dirk Bogarde’s mustache in Death in Venice stands as one of the most disturbing hairstyles ever put on film. Combined with his semi-shaggy banker’s do and his 1910s attire (say, sitting on the beach in a white three piece suit), his appearance is unforgettable even if this movie is relatively otherwise.
Hopelessly abstract to the point of silliness, Death in Venice follows Bogarde’s Gustav, a composer, on a holiday to Venice where he’s meant to relax. Instead he becomes obsessed with the very idea of “beauty.” It’s hard to blame him he encounters a procession of ugly goons throughout his stay, and the already crumbling city is under seige by an outbreak of cholera. You can almost understand why he’s looking for something pretty, but when his gaze lands on an androgynous teenage boy (Björn Andrésen) the film becomes beyond troubling. Gustav chases after the kid for the remainder of the film, obsessing about the cholera but subconsciously engineering ways to keep himself from having to leave Venice.
If you follow Visconti’s abstraction and consider the film for what it says about ugliness being all around us (and presumably that extends to Gustav’s dirty old man mind by the end of he picture) there’s some curious value to be found in Death in Venice. The film’s score is outstanding, and the cinematography is often good the Visconti is much too fond of zooming in haphazardly for the first hour of the picture. The performances are nothing to write home about Andrésen has virtually zero lines and Bogarde plays Gustav with a hamfist, practically drooling over the kid he’s stalking. But hey, maybe that was just the cholera talking.
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