The Tragedies of The Most Beautiful Boy

[PeterRS]

The photograph certainly doesn’t tell us much. An old man, his soulful eyes staring forward, wrapped up against the cold walking on the rocks by the sea, his beard and full head of very long white hair draped over his shoulders. He could be anyone in his mid-60s. Could he really have been a movie star, one of the most talked about on the planet? 

Copyright: MantarayFIlm2021

For those who were not born by about 1960 and so know little of his history, they soon will. For decades this elderly man despised the title “most beautiful boy in the world.” Yet he is happy with a new film and its identical title that will hit the screens at the end of the month. For its subject, that description is now no longer a heavy millstone around his neck. As he tells us in a fascinating article in yesterday’s Guardian newspaper, back in 1992 he finally got rid of all his demons - his mother’s suicide, the death of a daughter which almost ruined his marriage, the grandmother who brought him up and dispatched him to all manner of auditions single-mindedly determined that her grandson would become a star.

A recap. Out of the early morning darkness a steamer slowly emerges from the mist, its single chimney belching out black smoke. On the soundtrack we hear the start of the hauntingly beautiful Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. In a long opening shot, the camera follows the steamer as the sky gently lightens. Eventually the film cuts to a fifty-ish figure sitting wrapped up on deck seemingly unsure of what the he is doing and what the future will bring. Soon we realise he is sailing into the fabled city of Venice. This successful, widowed and disciplined composer whose life has been a constant search for the expression of beauty in music, has lost his muse. He has come to the Lido in Venice to re-find both himself and rediscover that beauty.  

As the film unfolds, he does indeed find both, but in such an unexpected manner it will so change and unbalance his life that reason abandons him. On a lonely beach in front of his hotel on Venice’s Lido, hideously made-up to appear more youthful, he eases into a deckchair, before him the vision that embodies the beauty he has discovered. He tries to reach forward, but his heart gives out and he slumps on his side. He dies alone in the shimmering heat, dressed in his three-piece white suit, his lips painted red, black hair dye streaking down his cheek as the strains of the lovely Adagietto come to an end.

By now, many will have recognised the film as the 1970 adaptation of Thomas Mann’s novella, Death in Venice, by the great Italian director Luchino Visconti. The lead role of the composer, Gustav von Aschenbach, is played by British actor, Dirk Bogarde. The vision he has seen, that essence of beauty, is in the form of a tall, slim mid-teens beautiful boy with flowing golden hair named Tadzio. 

When the film was released, many gays had gasped at the sight of the 15-year old Swedish actor, Björn Andrésen. Was it any wonder that Aschenbach was smitten by him? Who wouldn’t be? 

Copyright: Warner Bros

Death in Venice was soon being screened around the world. In Japan, Andrésen was sought after for television commercials and was mobbed almost as the Beatles had been mobbed just a few years earlier. It is claimed that he was one reason why many anime artists changed their depictions of effeminate young men

Most assumed Andrésen had to be gay. After all, for years it had been known that Visconti was gay. Within the business, the rumours were that the unmarried Dirk Bogarde was gay (after his death it was revealed he was indeed gay and had a life partner). Most of the crew working on the movie were gay. During the year’s search to find the right actor to play the role, surely Visconti would lean towards a young gay man.

In the Thomas Mann original, Tadzio represents merely a Platonic ideal of beauty. Visconti changes that in his movie. He makes Tadzio such a beautiful boy it is as though he has just walked out of a Botticelli painting. Aschenbach clearly looks at Tadzio with an increasingly intense, if initially misunderstood, passion. The camera lingers as he first sees Tadzio join his aristocratic Polish family in the hotel dining room. Eventually, Tadzio looks back at him, the look extending a little too long. Several times during the film Tadzio has a habit of placing one hand on a hip that has just a hint of camp about it. The hints seem just a little too obvious.

Eventually Achenbach cannot avoid close contact with the boy when they walk towards each other in the hotel corridor. As they pass, Tadzio turns to the older man. Here and in other scenes there is the faint glimpse of a “come hither” look. After deciding not to leave Venice in the face of a growing cholera epidemic, Aschenbach returns to the hotel. He meets Tadzio again on the beach when the boy is swinging between the poles of an awning. Yet again Visconti has Tadzio pause and look directly, almost knowingly, at Achenbach who in turn cannot draw himself away. 

 But this most beautiful boy was confused when making the movie, for Andrésen was not and never has been gay. He often said that Death in Venice destroyed his film career, so identified had be become as a homosexual youth. He talked of his discomfort at the looks he got from older men when Visconti took him and the film crew to a gay bar. 

“The waiters at the club made me feel very uncomfortable. They looked at me uncompromisingly as if I was a nice meaty dish.”

What would he say if he was to meet Visconti today? He is uncompromising. “Fuck off!” Being immortalised as a beautiful boy was not a blessing, but a curse. "I felt like an exotic animal in a cage," he says. And because it happened so early in his life, it distorted all his experience for years afterwards. 

After Death in Venice his career as a young actor declined, partly through mismanagement by his agent and perhaps through bad choices. His desire had always been to become a musician. Classically trained when younger he could play a piano concerto when required but rock music was his love. For decades he struggled in a rock band and playing occasional parts on stage. He lived in Stockholm with his wife and daughter, but tragedy dogged him. He lost a child to illness. As a result his happy marriage broke up. Eventually he was reunited with his wife and daughter. In 2003, though, he was particularly incensed when the feminist author Germaine Greer published a book titled The Beautiful Boy with his photo on the front without first obtaining his permission. She had, however, obtained approval from the photographer who owned the copyright. It was as though he was doomed forever to remain “the beautiful boy”.

Perhaps surprisingly, Andrésen allowed the directors of the new documentary film to follow him around for six years. As they say in The Guardian interview, “After being a public figure for so long, I think it was nice for him to take back the story of his life. We didn’t want Visconti experts or other talking heads discussing him. I think Björn also liked that we wanted to do a cinematic film, and to do it beautifully, like Death in Venice.”

The Most Beautiful Boy in the World opens in UK cinemas on 30 July.

Part of the above post includes excerpts from The Guardian article –

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/jul/15/death-in-venice-screwed-my-life-tragic-visconti-beautiful-boy-bjorn-andresen

[PeterRS]

 

[Volodya]

I still remember how I travelled to a big city as a teenager to watch the film in the cinema, most probably due to a very positive review. The effort was not in vain, for Tadzio’s elegant restraint and his boyish body made a lasting impression on me.

 

On 7/16/2021 at 5:49 AM, PeterRS said:

15-year old Swedish actor

Andresen's statement “I was just 16” seems to refer to his later stay in Cannes during the film festival. So the age range of our Tadzio figure goes from 15 to 14, 13 and 10:

Thomas Mann described in Death in Venice “a long-haired boy about fourteen years old”.

Katia Mann about the real Tadzio:

All the details of the story, beginning with the man at the cemetery, are taken from experience … In the dining-room, on the very first day, we saw the Polish family, which looked exactly the way my husband described them: the girls were dressed rather stiffly and severely, and the very charming, beautiful boy of about 13 was wearing a sailor suit with an open collar and very pretty lacings. He caught my husband's attention immediately. This boy was tremendously attractive, and my husband was always watching him with his companions on the beach. He didn't pursue him through all of Venice—that he didn’t do—but the boy did fascinate him, and he thought of him often… I still remember that my uncle, Privy Counsellor Friedberg, a famous professor of canon law in Leipzig, was outraged: “What a story! And a married man with a family!”

Wikipedia: The boy who inspired “Tadzio” was Baron Władysław Moes, whose first name was usually shortened as Władzio or just Adzio. […]

Moes was born on November 17, 1900 in Wierbka, the second son and fourth child of Baron Aleksander Juliusz Moes. He was aged 10 when he was in Venice, significantly younger than Tadzio in the novella. Baron Moes died on December 17, 1986 in Warsaw and is interred at the graveyard of Pilica, Silesian Voivodeship.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_in_Venice

[PeterRS]

In the video in my second post there is a short clip from a longer documentary about Visconti's year-long search for the  perfect Tadzio. When informed Andrésen is 15 he comments something like "a bit old". In fact he had 'auditioned' Andrésen quite early in the search but decided to wait until he had visited several other countries and seen many hundreds of other boys as possible for the part. This is the Italian Television documentary In Search of Tadzio (subtitles in English) which also includes narration of parts of the text of Mann's novella.

There is another long two-part documentary on youtube on the life of Dirk Bogarde who played Aschenbach in the movie. In itself this is also fascinating for it reveals a lot about this very private actor and the 40-year relationship with his "manager", Tony Forwood. Bogarde describes going with Visconti to Los Angeles to show the completed movie to some of its financial backers. At the end of the screening there was nothing but silence. Clearly there was more than a degree of shock at the subject matter (these being the start of the 19070s). To break the silence, one of the finance guys asked Visconti who had composed the music. When told Gustav Mahler, this innocent said, "He's great. Let's sign him up for more movies!"

 

[caeron]

 

Getting oggled while young is an experience that pretty much every woman has had.

[PeterRS]

The movie The Most Beautiful Boy has received mostly excellent reviews. On a limited release so far, it has a 76% score on Rotten Tomatoes. The film has been sold for distribution in several countries. No idea if it will ever appear in Thailand. 

The Guardian: A desperately unhappy story, sympathetically told

The Scotsman: Though full of sadness, it's ultimately a portrait of just how resilient a person can be in the face of so much pain.

Ian Thomas Malone: a harrowing, deeply moving experience that captures a star as gravity forces it back to earth

IndieWire: A crushing story of innocence destroyed by stardom

Financial Times: A deeply sad documentary about fame, its casualties and exploitation of children.