It was an odd decision to make the publicity and advertising for Death in Venice focus on the boy. I don't think he had any lines. He just walked around looking pretty. I don't know how Dirk Bogarde felt since he was the actual star.
Death in Venice was a 1971 Italian movie based on a short novel by Thoman Mann about a widower who goes alone to a resort in Venice. There, he becomes smitten with a lovely aristocratic Polish kid named Tadzio. He gazes at him, follows his family around town at one point.
There is another documentary on the Criterion Channel about the search for an actor to play Tadzio. In the book, he was 12, but none of the kids were good-looking enough until they found Bjorn Andreson who was a teenager.
When Death in Venice was shown at Cannes, director Luchino Visconti said that Andreson was "the most beautiful boy in the world", and that became their ad slogan. Posters for the movie featured Bjorn, not Dirk Bogarde as the old guy who found himself obsessed with the poor kid. Instead of showing Bogarde's character as dangerously confused, the publicity made it look like a perfectly normal reaction to the most breathtaking high school freshman on Earth.
No teenage boy wants to be "beautiful". A few might, but they should snap out of it. When Andreson went back to school, his classmates cruelly called him "Angel Lips".
Bjorn Andreson is in his 70's now. He had a difficult childhood, didn't know who his father was and was raised by his grandmother after a certain point. It sounds like the publicity for the film was more of a problem than the film itself. It was a bad experience that dragged on for years.
Available on the Criterion Channel.
No comments:
Post a Comment