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The event is Luchino Visconti's crossroads with Kubrick, Lolita goes in and out comes Barry Lyndon. The opening might be a wager with Antonioni over who can make a boat drift the slowest, Dirk Bogarde bundled up with pince-nez on the deck struggles not to doze off from Mahler on the soundtrack, the tone of magisterial somnolence is perfectly set. "The keeper of distances" on the Lido, a convalescing composer suspended between Teutonic rigidity and Italianate sensation. Hunters in the dark comprise his preferred metaphor for artists, "they don't know what the target is, and they don't know if they've hit it." Order and denial, the foundation of his aesthetic being, all of a sudden shaken by the sight of the beatific adolescent in a sailor suit (Björn Andrésen). "What kind of road have I chosen?" Visconti on Thomas Mann is a sustained dirge, a sumptuous flow toward oblivion, a mournful swoon. Sandcastles and strawberries by the shore, "Für Elise" and spousal doppelgängers in the brothel. The excruciating comedy of the fussbudget who takes a stab at decadence, secretly bubbling with merriment after a luggage mishap brings him back to the accidental hustler who might be his "spiritual conception of beauty." Encroaching pestilence out of Poe suits the presiding sense of lyrical corrosion—a composition of murky waters and white disinfectant set to church bells, a shimmering aquatic reflection that tilts up to a screen darkened by bonfire smoke. The cut to the jeering audience takes consideration of Russell's The Music Lovers, the beach in long shot points up Tati's Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot. Dye and rouge for the gentlemanly pederast, all the better to melt under the sun. "The man and the artist are one. They have touched bottom together." Fassbinder wastes no time putting The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant together. Cinematography by Pasqualino De Santis. With Silvana Mangano, Romolo Valli, Mark Burns, Nora Ricci, Marisa Berenson, and Carole André.
--- Fernando F. Croce |