CINEMA
See Venice and die
CHRISTOPHER HUDSON
It is almost always the case that a short story transposes better to the screen than a full length work of fiction. A good version of Anna Karen- Ma, Oliver Twist, Lolita or whatever, can cap- ture much of the action of the narrative and a representative portion of the dialogue; but the entire hinterland of gestures, reasons, thoughts, the small touches that give the nov- el atmosphere and dimension, are impossible to convey in any film of tolerable length. Luchino Visconti came up . against this problem in The Leopard nine years ago, and will probably meet it again when he films Proust. But Thomas Mann's story is short enough to be given us in its entirety. Visconti's version of Death in Venice ('AA,' Warner Rendezvous) is a film of staggering beauty. It has a wholeness and truthfulness to the spirit of the story which I can't des- cribe but urge all to go and appreciate for themselves.
Truthfulness to the spirit, but not neces- sarily to the text. Von Aschenbach, the central figure, is here a composer, not a writer; and to give expression to the argu- ment which engages him, on the true per- ception of beauty, an alter ego is imported who, in flashback, plays a rebellious Phaedrus to his Socrates. Mann apparently had Mahler in mind from the start (as well as his own experiences in Venice), and Mahler's music on the soundtrack does turn out to be a remarkably fitting accom- paniment to the film's moods. The alter ego, for his part, voices a central doubt which sets the composer's suffering in perspective.
If there is another difference, it is that the sexual overtones, naturally more promi- nent in a modern treatment of the story in- evitably distort the nature of the encounter between the man and the boy. But the general theme transcends this. Von Aschen- bach is a celebrated artist who, in middle age, rewards himself by turning away from the strun-1- and the multitude, in pursuit of a forihalism that creates its own world in which he can safely be an immortal. On a holiday in Venice, at the Grand Hotel des Bains, he becomes obsessed by the beauty of a young Polish boy. As the days go by, and mounting rumours of a cholera epidemic disturb the city, the composer is beaten down by the realisation that sensual beauty has a perfection which formal art cannot encompass. His world in pieces, no longer the immortal artist, Aschenbach is faced with his own human frailty and dies in ecstasy, the humiliated lover.
The beauty which Aschenbach cannot put into words, Visconti approaches, by adding the image of it and the music. From the beginning, with the composer setting out across the water on a grey day, in a slight mist, he draws down on us the at- mosphere of settled melancholy. Turn-of- the-century Venice is recreated in oppressive splendour: the hotel, with its ornate hat-
stands, lamp-stands and flower-stands spiral- ling upwards in vast rooms; the square of candy-striped beach huts; and the grey, flaking alleyways of the city, as Aschenbach pursues the boy and his dream of beauty.
Aschenbach himself is all that matters in the film. Dirk Bogarde is so good in this part that in any case he needs no support. He is given little to say, except in the flash- backs, but the fussy gestures, the small, naïvely delighted smiles, the feverish looks, are perfectly expressive of the inner struggles, growing more and more desperate as time runs out and he can find no reso- lution. It is a personal triumph for him in a film which is full of triumphs over difficulties of interpretation and atmos- phere. The more I think about it, the more it begins to look like a masterpiece.
It's a pity that Jules Dassin's latest film, Promise at Dawn ('AA,' Leicester Square Theatre) arrived in London the same week as Death in Venice, because the period settings, very important to it, look super- ficial by comparison. Scripted from an autobiographical memoir by Romain Gary, it tells the story of a Russian-Jewish actress whose life centres upon her young son. In the best Jewish mama tradition, she vene- rates him, scolds him, hectors him, spoils him, fusses over him and works her fingers to the bone to keep them both alive, in a complicated journey from nineteen-twenties Leningrad to Nice, via Cracow; while the boy, Romain, is taught how to put away childish things. The film, finely photo- graphed, but sentimental and rather trivial, is only saved by Melina Mercouri's per- formance as the actress. It is her predictable mixture of the tender and tigerish, haggard and beautiful; but her sheer vitality keeps the rest moving sluggishly along.
Jane Eyre ('A,' Carlton) is a wooden adaptation of the novel, and compounds the felony by being ludicrously miscast. George C. Scott. an American heavyweight last seen here in Patton: Lust for Glory, plays Rochester, and the part of the 'plain' girl, Jane Eyre, is taken by Susannah York. Under these conditions, it hardly needs saying, the film is a complete disaster. Very little better is Hotel Paradiso ('A,' Ritz), a Feydeau farce which should have been left on the stage.
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