FIlm Studies: How to make the worst 'great' film ever

There is plague in the city in Death in Venice. But have no fear, for it is a good year for plague – the death is dry, well-fruited. It's like a Sangiovese called "Suicide" – and maybe the worst "great" film ever made. The film is being revived, as part of a BFI Visconti tribute. But it's past resuscitation. Nor is the famous Venice much in view. This film is Lido-bound; there's little glimpse of the great buildings. And, until the end, Visconti is too artistic to deal in direct sunlight. He prefers the wintry overcast that lets us see the dove-grey in some of the clothes, and the blue pinstripe in Tadzio's bathing costume. As well as the Normandy butter sheen of Tadzio's skin... if only skin could act.

Why did anyone think of filming the Thomas Mann novella in which Gustave von Aschenbach watches Tadzio for the price of admission: death? Call it what you will – a portrait of intellect giving up the ghost; the search for beauty meeting its nemesis; or a withheld homosexual dream – Death in Venice doesn't cry out for a film. Maybe the most we will ever learn about Visconti is that he could not resist the stupid challenge.

The film makes several adjustments. In the novella, Aschenbach is a writer; in the movie he becomes a composer. This permits Visconti to roll out Mahler by the mile on the sound-track. Thus, in terms of emotional texture, the grave austerity of Mann's style is replaced by the sweeping emotionalism of Mahler. In the concert hall, this may be a great experience, but as soon as you employ Mahler as "illustration", then everything else in the film runs the risk of being sentimentalised, or vulgarised. Then, for the movie, Visconti and his co-writer, Nicola Badalucco, have invented flashbacks to help "explain" Aschenbach. They do no such thing.

Instead, they are foolish, stilted fragments of private melodrama that detract from what might be the concentrating point of view of Aschenbach's observation of Tadzio and himself.

In the novella, Aschenbach never owns up to his gayness – is that why Dirk Bogarde always protested that Death in Venice wasn't a homosexual film? And while Mann's restraint is true to his time of writing (1912) and his intriguing mixture of the didactic and the shy, the veil is mere frippery when offered in the context of a movie. Indeed, the fundamental source of travesty in this film is that it is a sad queen's weepie, without ever having the courage to own up to that, or to show what Fassbinder, say, might have shown, if he'd been given the idea in 1971 and asked to do Death in Munich, instead.

On the contrary, with designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti and cameraman Pasqualino de Santis, Visconti made a film that his distraught leading man could argue away as merely a story about sensibility and refinement. And so, alas, the Mahler, the forlorn grace of Venice, the melancholy light, and the ponderous slowness of the film are lumped together as a proof of Visconti's "distinction". Whereas, that plutocrat and aesthete was at best a coarse purveyor of melodrama who always ran the risk of getting turgid.

As early as The Leopard, Joan Didion had observed that Visconti has "less sense of form than anyone now directing. One might as well have viewed a series of stills, in no perceptible order." Pauline Kael lamented that "he just goes on without us, heavily treading water." And here, with such meagre action (and such ostentatious inwardness, so that an idiot gets it in two shots), Visconti feels eternally free to demonstrate his taste.

In the end, you want the Python gang doing Death in Broadstairs. Instead, you have Bogarde huffing and puffing towards some stroke of thwarted desire, his lately dyed hair running down his face, and Mahler pounding away in his own world.

d.thomson@independent.co.uk