Visconti’s Sorrow

By chance I have had an opportunity to watch again Conversation Piece, the second-last of Luchino Visconti’s films, and at the same time I have come across an old news cutting from the Age (“Decadent direction”, February 24, 2003—a critical article by David Thomson). This conjunction invites me to attempt a brief appreciation of the film, the director and his oeuvre. It is not decadence that I find here, but, rather, the magnificence of supreme artistry—an artistry which rose again and again like a phoenix out of the soul of this man, easily shedding aside his limitations and prejudices, perhaps even to his own surprise; and ultimately making a statement which many critics, such as Thomson, have failed to see and understand because of their own shortcomings and meanness of spirit.

Count Don Luchino Visconti di Modrone was a great lover and his oeuvre includes a number of outstanding films that testify to that ardour of soul. He loved the aristocratic lifestyle into which he was born. You can see this love expressing itself throughout Conversation Piece in the exquisite presentation of the beauty of the Professor’s home in an Italian palace—in the furniture and its arrangements, in the stylish depictions of evening meals, in little details such as Stefano’s praise for the glorious red wine from the Professor’s estate and the momentary self-congratulatory smile of the Professor in acknowledgment. Visconti’s love of the high life is equally apparent in his presentation of the fine clothes worn by the Marchesa, by her daughter Lietta and by Conrad. It is visible in the easy effortlessness with which all the major characters move through their lives during the action, no matter that there are quarrels, insults, outrage and malicious disagreements.

It appears that Visconti developed an interest in Marxism; but it never succeeded in effacing his adoration of the way of the aristocrats, of whom he was always one. Thus we have a whole series of aristocratic worlds rendered with superb taste and inventiveness—the hotel in Death in Venice, the two palaces in The Leopard, the mansions in The Innocent and the Professor’s apartment in Conversation Piece.

In the Book of Genesis, God looks upon his creations after each day and is pleased with what he has brought into being. In his life as a mature and successful film director Visconti looked upon the aristocratic world into which he had been providentially born and was pleased with it. And why not? It marked a particular quality of refinement in human living which has rarely been equalled, let alone excelled, in any culture. Not for nothing are biblical accounts of heaven cast in terms of aristocratic lifestyle!

Visconti was also a lover of human beauty and of the sensual excitement of physical love-making taken to its extreme of pleasure. His films show us the objects of such amour: Angelica in The Leopard, Conrad in Conversation Piece, Tadzio in Death in Venice and Giuliana in The Innocent. Here Visconti shows that his aristocratic taste, his yearning for the best of the best, extended into the world of love as well as the world of palaces and great homes.

This man, who also successfully directed operas and plays, shows in his films that he had a splendid ear. To take merely two examples from Conversation Piece, his choice of a beautiful Mozart aria is used brilliantly to help establish the bond between the Professor and Conrad that grows and grows as the film develops; it tells both the Professor and us that, whatever his faults of character (and they are many), Conrad has a sensitive and ardent soul. By contrast there is the pop song to which Conrad, Lietta and Stefano are dancing in the nude, while indulging in group sex and the smoking of a joint: it is the sort of music Dante might have chosen for Paolo and Francesca in The Inferno—pleasantly melodious, cheerful and uninhibited, but coloured more darkly by a prevailing melancholy that tells us that these young people are not happy.

David Thomson begins his article by dwelling on the alleged cruelty of Visconti; and the accompanying photograph of the director is well chosen to support this point of view. However, again and again it is apparent in his great films that Visconti was a man of enormous compassion as well as enormous insight into human nature. In a sense the Professor in Conversation Piece is a projection of the sixty-seven-year-old director himself. The portrait shows that, although Visconti could see clearly the shallowness and infidelities of the life of “the jet set”, he was capable of looking beyond it to the human suffering of each character, a suffering shown at times most tellingly in the Marchesa, and even more so in the Professor and Conrad.

There is great subtlety shown in that last relationship. By the denouement, the Professor has indeed psychologically adopted Conrad as his son, has come to love him deeply while being fully aware of his weaknesses, and grieves inconsolably over Conrad’s death as he himself dies later in a hospital bed.

Conrad is also a projection of Visconti. It is into him that the director has placed his Marxism, which seems to amount largely to a romantic rejection of the “corporate world” and the “upper crust”, which is seen as riddled with corruption and poisoned by the willingness to commit murder. It is a simplistic creed, but not lacking in good-heartedness; and Visconti lets it win the day against the arguments of the “right” in the concluding quarrel of the action.

There are some things one does not look for in Visconti. The religious sense, the awareness of sacred space and supernatural mysteries, is totally lacking; so is the experience of “true love” of the kind we associate with Romeo and Juliet, with Zhivago and Lara.

“Luchino Visconti imposed himself on others,” wrote Thomson. One thinks here of Wagner, who did the same. Without that kind of selfishness their great works would never have been realised. Thomson also notes that Visconti cherished “distinction, property and command”. This is true and is shown in his great films. The aristocrat (a European term) is the kshatriya or knight (a Hindu term); it is essential to his nature that he have both the power and the capacity to lead men. This also is a worthy characteristic, which Visconti celebrates, notably in Prince Fabrizio and the Professor.

 There is no doubt that a major theme of Visconti’s is the decadence and degeneracy of the European aristocracy at the end of the nineteenth century, something he observed personally and something he was able to square with his idealistic Marxism. Thus, when presenting his aristocrats, the director is both having his cake and eating it: he is celebrating them and damning them at the same time. The damnation is at its most acute at the end of The Innocent, Visconti’s last film, when Tullio shoots himself.

However, Thomson’s condemnation of Visconti as himself decadent is a mistake. Thomson wrote: “For all the worldliness of Visconti, these are among the most ridiculous films ever made. Under the guise of a disdainful, classically snobbish farewell to the plain world, the pictures are truly decadent.” And of Death in Venice he added: “Some regard it as a gruesome parody of the ‘art film’.” How wrong can you be! It is one of the most deeply felt and most fully realised threnodies to lost love—or unattainable love—that has ever been composed.

It is an open-eyed Visconti that shows the decadence of European aristocracy; and his judgments of its failings are judicious and fearless. In the last resort he was clearly projecting his own personal life-drama or agon of soul into film; and here I support Thomson’s final insight but assess it differently: “monstrous self-monument”. Yes, but only if we accept the original meaning of the Latin monstrum: a prodigy, an epiphany—not a grotesque or ugliness or distortion. Visconti was one of Europe’s greatest prodigal sons; and his films present his story with artistry that has rarely been matched by other directors.

Unfortunately he never “came to himself”, as did the figure in the biblical parable of the prodigal son. Inevitably, then, Visconti’s great films are suffused with an immense pagan sadness and painful sense of man’s mortality. Look at the endings of so many of them! Prince Fabrizio, returning from the ball at which Angelica has shone in her lust and beauty that is not for him to enjoy, and seeing a priest taking the last rites to some person dying nearby: a blunt reminder of his own fragility of flesh. Von Aschenbach meeting Death in a deckchair on the Lido. The Professor hearing in his imagination the footsteps of Death in the room overhead as he comes to his end in a hospital bed. Tullio shooting himself in despair and shame. There is an Ali Baba’s cave within each individual human soul, but the great Italian director never found the password to his own. Perhaps he had long stopped searching for it.