Yesterday I was walking about an area of the city that was relatively unfamiliar to me when I spotted a group of sidewalk bars, restaurants, and tea shops. Nothing too unusual here except that they were all quite crowded with the tea shop (or salon de the) being particularly vibrant and packed with basically the very young.

The time was late afternoon, 4:00 to 5:00pm, and a significant number of these seemingly joyous and content young people were mothers with their babies!

I was struck with their easy laughter and their confident manner, not to mention the kind of innocent beauty that often accompanies the young. They were having a very good time, a bright conviviality that managed to spread its wings and seemingly affect all in the vicinity – including myself and, more often than not, that’s a difficult challenge.

I’ve been told that France has seen a significant increase in the number of young French girls who have chosen to keep their babies after an unmarried pregnancy to forge on as single mothers of choice.

I have no idea how many of these seemingly delightful young mothers fit that description but the entire scene including that of Le Volupte — the salon de the and its neighboring pastry shops — was quite uplifting, particularly when compared to the bored, tattooed, studded, "clothes askew and about to come off" look that we see so often in North America.

There was love and friendship and pride in the air! And it reminded me of the excellent Norman Jewison movie about love in a bakery: "Moonstruck" with Cher and Nicholas Cage.

But however charming and enjoyable "Moonstruck" is, I couldn’t help being drawn to another movie — a much better film, I think — that could be rightly called a classic: "Death in Venice" starring Dirk Bogarde and directed by Luchino Visconti.

You see, the writer of these musings is 70 years old this year, and the sight of these beautiful young people with their even more beautiful babies at carefree play gave way to a melancholy associated with a life moving inexorably to its completion. This is not a bad feeling or even sad, just a realization that the miracle of life and its attendant joys is finite.

No better movie than "Death in Venice," made without a misstep, to mark the feelings engendered that afternoon by this vibrant and effusive group of young Cannois.

Movie Review:

Death in Venice

Directed by Luchino Visconti —Warner Brothers, 1971
Starring: Dirk Bogarde, Bjorn Andresen, and Silvana Mangano

In this celebrated and beautiful film, the winner of a special 25th anniversary prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1971, Dirk Bogarde plays Gustav Aschenbach, a famous composer who, because of exhaustion and illness, is compelled to take an extended vacation in the summer of 1911. He chooses to vacation at the Grand Hotel des Bains on the Lido Beach in Venice – a temple to the “haute bourgeoisie” of the era.

“Death in Venice” is adapted from the novel of Thomas Mann and Visconti changed the vocation of Aschenbach from that of a writer to that of a composer presumably so that it would be more natural to create a music soundtrack consisting of the work of Gustav Mahler taken from his third and fifth symphonies.

The resulting combination of the stunning photography of a recreated, 1911 Venice along with the lush and evocative music of Mahler is a powerful and emotional expression of a time and place that is, by itself, enough to recommend this film unhesitatingly.

Visconti and his production team refurbished parts of the abandoned Grand Hotel; mainly the great salons and dining rooms and they are beautiful to see – populated by people costumed like peacocks so that the screen takes on a dream-like quality.

Aschenbach, who is battling his homosexuality and the resulting guilt around it in respect to the family he loves, sees the beautiful young boy, Tadzio, who is at the hotel with his Polish family whose matriarch is played by Silvano Mangano – a famous star from the Italian “neo-realist” cinema of early, post WWII days. Aschenbach becomes obsessed with Tadzio and his beauty, perfectly played by Bjorn Andresen.

Much of the thoughtful underpinnings of the film are provided by Aschenbach’s musings about art and beauty. Such statements as these are used as punctuation points: “beauty pre-exists our presumption as artists” and “the creation of beauty through art is a spiritual act” and “art is indifferent to morality” and “there is no impurity as impure as old age”.

In this summer of 1911, cholera descends upon Venice and terms such as “pestilence” and “plague” are used as the tourists abandon the Lido but Aschenbach stays to pursue, from afar, his love for the beauty of the young Tadzio. Aschenbach also pursues youth itself through make-up, hair dye and clothes but he only succeeds in transforming himself into a bizarre and grotesque man of questionable morality.

“Death in Venice” is a grand, cinematic poem, set to the luxuriant music of Mahler, which ponders such ideas as art and beauty, youth and age, life and death, love and morality, etc. and is played out within the decaying beauty of Venice itself.

It’s not a story of precise plot lines but rather a collection of gorgeous images in no rush to resolution. Aschenbach’s dying scenes set against the classic poses of Tadzio are moving, but, for me, not tragic – just the nature of life.

Reminiscent really of a 70 year old man having a pastry and tea one beautiful, September afternoon observing, with a degree of melancholy, a group of laughing, young “Cannois” enjoying the early years of their journey.