![]() ![]() Visconti undermines this contrast between beauty and the intellect by changing the Aschenbach character from a writer to a composer. The boy's youth and naturalness become a reproach to the older man's vanity and creative sterility. ![]() ![]() The boy represents, above all, an ideal of perfect physical beauty apart from sexuality the irony is that this beauty stirs emotions in a man who (in the novel) has insisted on occupying the world of the intellect. His feelings toward this boy are terribly complicated, and to interpret them as a simple homosexual attraction is vulgar and simplistic. Once settled in his grand hotel on the Lido, he becomes aware of a beautiful boy who is also visiting there with his family from Poland. In the novel, Count Aschenbach goes to Venice at a certain season in his life, driven by a compulsion he does not fully understand and confronted by strange presences who somehow seem to be mocking or tempting him. Visconti has chosen to abandon the subtleties of the Thomas Mann novel and present us with a straightforward story of homosexual love, and although that's his privilege, I think he has missed the greatness of Mann's work somewhere along the way. I think the thing that disappoints me most about Luchino Visconti's "Death in Venice" is its lack of ambiguity. ![]()
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