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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
In "The Fixer" (1968), Bogarde uncharacteristically plays a kindly role, and while he brings his usual effete, eyebrow-cocking sensitivity to it, there is something a little unctuous about the portrayal. In allowing his naturally compassionate instincts to rule his performance, Bogarde comes off as almost too garishly sainted. His eyes appear to be moistened by the beauty of his own moral rectitude. His lines are part of the problem, but this role is an argument for Bogarde's being best used as an agent of corruption.
Bogarde's collaborations with Luchino Visconti were also particularly fruitful. "The Damned" (1968) is a vintage Bogarde vehicle, in which he plays the overreaching lover of the heiress to the Essenbeck steel works, a German company under pressure from Hitler's National Socialist Party, which is quickly gaining political speed.
In the interest of preserving the corporation, the family opts to cooperate, albeit unhappily, with what becomes the Nazi regime. "The Damned" is a great film: moody, gorgeous, smart, brutal and sleazy. Helmut Berger is superlative as the perverse son of Bogarde's lover; Charlotte Rampling, at her most absurdly fetching, provides stellar eye-candy in a supporting role. Bogarde, as is customary for him, quietly anchors the near-melodramatic extremities of the plot with his own fearless honesty.
"Personal morals are dead. We are an elite society where everything is permissible," one of the characters, quoting Hitler, tells Dirk, this concept being the axis on which the film's characters eventually spin out of control.
Bogarde's character, under pressure from his Lady Macbeth-esque lover, finds himself in a downward spiral of unending moral degradation. "I've accepted a ruthless logic, and I can never get away from it," Bogarde gasps, as his corrupt decisions catch up with him. It's a line no American star could deliver convincingly.
As professor Gustav von Aschenbach in Visconti's "Death in Venice" (1971) Bogarde delivers one of his finest performances in his most demanding role. For the character of a great composer frightened by his failing health and the prospect of death, he abandoned any semblance of vanity, allowing himself to look clerkish and mealy; he adopted a gimpy, mincing little walk, his bald spot showing through a gray-streaked comb-over.
The film is studded with long-haired Thomas Mann-erisms that only an actor of Bogarde's intelligence could pull off without sounding absurd: "Evil is a necessity -- it is the food of genius" and "Beauty exists without regard to your labor."
Meanwhile, in Venice, absurdly beautiful boys play homoerotic tackle games in thin one-piece bathing costumes. Youth and beauty mock von Aschenbach; the Polish boy he becomes obsessed with (who looks like a young Candice Bergen), gives him sultry come-hither stares that destroy him -- he is tormented by a spirit willing itself toward ultimate beauty while encased in advancing decay.
There is an incredible moment of Bogarde's screen magic during the famous scene at the barbershop. The barber darkens his hair, daubs strange white makeup onto his cheeks and rouge on his lips, in an effort to restore his youth. Von Aschenbach allows himself a tiny, approving, hopeful smile at his reflection in the mirror when his makeover is complete. It's truly horrible, the smile of a man about to fly into a thousand bloody pieces, trying to hold himself together with lipstick.
His death scene is a particularly awesome feat of emotional athleticism: Dirk laughs, dies, cries and sweats black hair dye down his face while reaching a profound philosophical Truth, watching the beautiful boy walk out to sea. Bogarde's longing is palpable; he plays the scene so deeply he manages to evoke nostalgia, physical surrender, awe, misery, futility, lust and a strange, vindicating dignity, all at the same time. (Try that, Kevin Costner.)
