text: A film to divide its viewers. Just criticism points at its funereal pace, over-used snap zooms and persistent, lingering gazes between the protagonists. Advocates point to Dirk Bogarde's mighty performance and Pasqualino De Santis' benchmark photography of Venice.<br /><br />Taken altogether, this might suggest an indulgent, romanticised elegy for the nobility of homosexual love (at a time, 1971, when it was becoming consensually legal). In fact Visconti has succeeded in making a richer, more complex film than such a single-issue vehicle. He has knit his ideas - foibles and all - into a meticulously paced arc.<br /><br />Inside this does indeed sit the central performance of Bogarde's Aschenbach. Rather than a simpering, Johnny-come-lately gay, he manages to give a pathetic composer beaten by tragedy and misunderstood integrity who sees salvation in Tadzio. His mesmerised staggering around an increasingly hellish Venice after the boy is a straight metaphor for the artist's tenacity for truth in the teeth of the dilettante mob (and it is explicitly cut with such a flashback).<br /><br />Mahler's music is possibly a little over-used although it is well appropriated. The Italian overdub is a wearing anachronism but thankfully the acting doesn't suffer too much. 7/10