Frescoes & fiascoes: Italia ad absurdum

I’m afraid I’ve wasted my time this week with two terrible movies, only partially redeemed by handsome widescreen travelogues of Florence and Venice respectively. Light in the Piazza (1961, TCM/T, n.) is merely nonsensical until you start to think about it, when it becomes offensive. What’s a beautiful retarded girl (Yvette Mimieux) to do but go to Italy and fall in love with a puppyish rich Italian boy (George Hamilton!), where she’ll fit right in and no one will notice her mental deficiency? Her mother (Olivia de Havilland) is in a quandary, about whether to let her go and whether to succumb to the charms of the boy’s father (Rossano Brazzi.) The viewer is in a quandary, whether to turn off this idiocy or turn off his mind and simply absorb the beauty of Tuscany. One wonders how this was turned into a musical that recently won five Tony awards? Maybe Broadway audiences don’t notice its mental deficiency. Death in Venice (1971, dvd, r.) is awful in a different way. This was the movie that gave me a negative impression of Luchino Visconti, which subsequently has been overturned by catching up with his earlier masterpieces, but I am far from won over by a second viewing. This adaptation of the Thomas Mann novel is punishingly slow and ludicrously overt, albeit with some visual elegance. Dirk Bogarde is not too bad as Aschenbach (changed from writer to composer, to justify the Mahler soundtrack), but most of the film is a resolutely unfunny joke, a deathly artifice about the perverse vitality of beauty . Did I mention that the movie is s-l-o-w-w-w . . . adagio . . . lentamente . . . z-z-z-z-z-z? I’m not giving these movies a numerical grade, but if you take my word for it, you don’t want to see either of them, unless you’re hankering for the scenery.