Since its release, people have harped on “Call Me by Your Name” for the seven-year age gap between Elio and Oliver, its enamored 17- and 24-year-old protagonists. Some fans make the pedantic argument that such a relationship is completely above board according to Italian law, but there are stronger defense cases to be made.
Sure, a relationship between a 17- and a 24-year-old could be unhealthy, but putting aside hypotheticals, is the relationship that director Luca Guadagnino shows us actually injurious? No, not at all. In their romance, Elio and Oliver are equals.
“Call Me by Your Name” presents a compelling landscape of two people who happened upon each other in Northern Italy in the summer of 1983. Guadagnino picked beautiful filming locations and good actors, and he does them justice from behind the camera. He shot them masterfully and put together a soundtrack for the ages. How someone can take in this arresting work of art and be moved not to cry but to whine perplexes me.
But if we’re going to scrutinize such a relationship, we shouldn’t just assess the ages and arithmetic, the statutes and jurisprudence; we should consider the cultural context. Being gay in 1983, for example, is not being gay in 2023.
So “Call Me by Your Name” holds water, but what about “Death in Venice,” screened last Thursday at the Browning Cinema at the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center? Take the seven year age gap in “Call Me by Your Name” and multiply it by about five. Our two main characters (the obsessive Dr. Aschenbach and Tadzio, his obsession) are 53- and 14-years-old, respectively. If you run the numbers, that’s a 39-year age gap.
The justifications we came up with for “Call Me by Your Name” don't work here. Dr. Aschenbach and Tadzio’s relationship is so one-sided I’m hesitant to even call it a relationship — it’s pure obsession. Dr. Aschenbach soliloquizes to the camera about Tadzio’s beauty uninterrupted for minutes on end; Tadzio doesn’t speak to him once.
“Death in Venice” is set around 1910, but no matter the date and no matter what laws and no matter which context, no relationship between a 53- and a 14-year-old will ever be healthy. Dr. Aschenbach’s relationship with Tadzio is disgusting, and yet on director Luchino Visconti’s sets, through his lenses and over his soundtrack, it’s beautiful.
When you sit down to watch “Death in Venice” in theaters, Visconti sets you behind Dr. Aschenbach’s glasses. You watch Tadzio play on the beach and in the water; you watch him from in alleyways and around corners. There are long stretches void of dialogue, just longing, just desire.
It’s supposed to make you squirm. As a friend who braved the movie with me put it, “This would be literally unbearable without the music.” But these little things that Visconti does to make the movie bearable are the actually grossest part. The music and the cinematography — by making what naturally feels awkward instead feel acceptable and even beautiful — convince you that Dr. Aschenbach’s twisted desires might be alright after all.
So as cholera spreads through Venice, and when the doctor decides not to flee because it would mean having to leave Tadzio, we’re not blindsided. We’ve been brainwashed by the nice sounds and the pretty colors, and to us, it seems like a reasonable decision.
But when Dr. Aschenbach dies of cholera sitting in a beach chair while watching Tadzio play in the sand, we get a rude awakening. This is what happens when we blindly follow desire, when we blindly follow art — death.
Today, film discourse often devolves into denunciation and defense. “This movie is incorrect and immoral,” or “This movie seems incorrect and immoral, but here’s why it’s actually not.” If you watch “Death in Venice” with a moral rubric in hand, it inevitably fails. When you watch the movie on its own terms, though, you get a much more convincing argument against perversion than “That’s not allowed!” — which is all these ethical litmus tests can offer.
‘Death in Venice’ at Browning: A squirmer for the ages
Anna Falk | The Observer
