Death in Venice

Visconti takes the veneer and calls it furniture. With infinite tedium, he pores over every facet of Tadzio's Botticelli visage.

Visconti's mastery of visual style almost succeeds in creating the very ideas and feelings that his heavy-handed narrative entirely misses.

Instead of bringing the story to life, Visconti has, I'm afraid, embalmed it.

Not even the classical soundtrack can turn this ponderous portrait of one man's obsession into the cinematic classic it has so often been mistaken for.

“Death in Venice” is a film about humanity’s slow transcendence into nothingness and everything. It exists in the space between life and death, between youth and old age, between ignorance and wisdom.

Visconti finds beauty not only in Andrésen and the exquisite city of love, but also in the storytelling.

As I watched Death in Venice... I got the feeling I was looking at something rare indeed in the world of films -- a work of art.

Death in Venice plays like an inside joke for Visconti to fool around with homosexual themes at a time when doing so more blatantly would have crossed obscenity lines.

An Italian filmmaker, an English actor, and a German novelist walk into the cinema... Magic results.

It elects to dwell on absence and emptiness, sucking the sweet wound of upper class inertia like one would a cut on the lip or a sore on the tongue.