Death in Venice (1971)
Directed by Luchino Visconti
Composer Gustav von Aschenbach travels to Venice for health reasons. There, he becomes obsessed with the stunning beauty of an adolescent Polish boy named Tadzio who is staying with his family at the same Grand Hôtel des Bains on the Lido as Aschenbach.
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What critics compared Death in Venice to
(I haven’t seen such artful drips since 1971, when Dirk Bogarde’s hair dye melted, along with his soul, at the end of “Death in Venice.”)
The sickly sweet tone reminds me of Luchino Visconti's pageant of fascist "beauty," The Damned (1969), as well as his adaptation of Mann's Death in Venice (1971).
Call Me by Your Name is suffused with a cosmopolitan sense of attraction that makes it feel like a throwback to Thomas Mann’s seminal Death in Venice, about a writer who falls for a beautiful youth, and other stories of the kind—minus the tragedy.
“Youth,” his latest, a lush English-language production, might be described as a hybrid evocation of Fellini’s semi-autobiographical “8A” and Luchino Visconti’s adaptation of Thomas Mann’s scandalous novella “Death in Venice.”
Youth is a good bit like Fellini’s 8 1/2 (1963) and has elements of Ken Russell’s Mahler (1974) — with maybe just a touch of Visconti’s Death in Venice (1971) — but is ultimately, its own beautiful thing.
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Consider the next best thing: a jaunt to your local video store, where you can pick up the diametrically opposed but concurrently released travelogues Under the Tuscan Sun and Death in Venice.
Back to the dead!” shouts the village MC (Björn Andrésen, strangely alluring all these years since Visconti’s Death in Venice ), inaugurating the traditional search for the incoming May Queen, who’ll bless the community with fertility.
Throw in an embrace of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and Magic Mountain, and you have the makings of something special – if it didn't all collapse in a tedious, bloated cacophony of silliness.
Its pained interrogation of art, beauty, December love, truth and falsity has a Death in Venice lugubriousness, and not for nothing is the main character called Oldman.