Cinema
Mauling Mahler
Christopher Hudson
The sea pounds the headland; the rich symphonic music swells and lours; on the desolate rocks a white chrysalis inches painfully out of its white cocoon and writhes across the grey stones to plant warm lips on the rock-hewn features of its dead husband. There can be no mistake. It is the first movement of Mahler's third symphony, and we are into another of Ken Russell's bargain basement introductions to the Classics ('AA' Odeon Haymarket) For the price of an admission ticket, the fantasy life of a famous composer at your fingertips. We awake to the lavishly appointed compartment of a railway train, bringing Mahler home through Austria after a triumphant tour of the United States. Opposite him the chrysalis has taken off her bandages and is dressed in smart 1910 fashions — his wife Alma. The train stops at a station and, Alma relieving herself, the opportunity is taken to put Visconti in his place. To adagio strains we recognise from Death in Venice, a blond boy in a sailor outfit strolls across the platform swinging provocatively from pillar to pillar, watched from a bench by a rouged figure who bears a certain resemblance to the late von Aschenbach. Mahler looks on with a slight smile, as if thinking, that's how it ulsed to be.
The composer is ill; the pale, strained, ascetic face behind the rimless glasses tells its story of long suffering nobly born. Lapsing into reverie, as we all do on trains, he is back in his summerhouse on the edge of a lake in the Dolomites, attempting to compose, while Alma rushes up and down the alp enjoining silence on bell-ringers, shepherds with pipes and colourful Moravian peasants dancing to old folk tunes in a nearby hostelry. In the sudden, sunlit quietness the Muse grasps Mahler by the throat, and music pours out of him on to the paper while the screen spins with mountain peaks and planets to indicate the awesome majesty of his composition. What inspired such genius? Helpfully sinking deeper into reverie, Mahler takes us back to his father's wine and spirit store, where as a callow child clutching schoolbooks he catches sight of his father making love to the maid in the backyard and is overcome by a fear of the unknown. Other relevant traumas include learning from a bullying music master who keeps his earnings from daily lessons under a plaster of Paris statuette of Wagner, and meeting in the woods Ronald Pickun improbably accoutred as a leech gathering accordion player who teaches young Gustav to love and respect his natural surroundings.
Ken Russell is prodigal with allusions, although they are mostly to his own earlier films. Gustav riding furiously through the countryside on horseback is lucky never to collide with young Elgar galloping in the opposite direction. Other savage messiahs from the past are conjured up in Mahler's fantasy of being buried alive in a windowed coffin, from which he sees Alma doing a striptease in front of her admirers in the crematorium, ending up straddled across a great horn while two eyeballs stare at her balefully from the composer's ashes; and in the obligatory asylum sequence in which the lunatic Hugo Wolf, naked in his cell, wipes his bottom with a song score and mutters, "that's all the critics think my music is good for."
That's showbiz: nobody takes genius seriously, as Ken Russell knows all too well. Mahler has to suffer all manner of indignities, like having to take a giant aluminium Star of David up a mountain to the jackbooted Cosima Wagner and sacrifice his Jewishness by masticating the snout of a pig before being permitted to take over a good German opera company. Robert Powell as Mahler, vibrating wall creative venom under a stove-PiPe hat, emerges from the ordeal with great aplomb; and Georgina Hale is even better, in fact surprisinglY good, as she querulously enunciates the outlandish role of Alma. There's no question but that Russell knows how to direct actors and how to direct cameras — putting them together that seems to defeat him nowadays. The film ends in thunderous and sustained applause, ostensibly for Bernard Haitink and his orchestra. But it is difficult to resist the picture of Russell applauding himself — like a circus bear after executing one of its ponderous dances.
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