Tadzio (Death in Venice)

Björn Andresen (70) has passed away. "The most beautiful boy in the world" (which later turned out to be a horror for the man) was responsible for me once falling madly in love with a... boy in the middle of late adolescence. For the record, I'm completely straight. But I wasn't alone in the class.

Luchino Visconti's beautiful film " Death in Venice " (1971), based on Thomas Mann's classic, left an incredible impression on me/us. The declining composer Von Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde) ends up in a hotel on the Lido, obsessed with the angelic beauty of the Polish Tadzio, a fifteen-year-old boy. The film's cleverness was that "beauty" wasn't cast as a predictable female sweet sixteen , which would immediately take on a somewhat sensual dimension. Unfortunately, some interpret the film as a film about pedophilia, which it isn't.

No, Tadzio was a symbol of aesthetic beauty, regardless of sexual preference. A feeling that also lingers when you admire, say, beautiful Greek or Renaissance statues (think David) and paintings.

Aesthetics possesses a transcendent power that, symbolic or not, can stand alone and either "captures" you or not. I was in love. "Tadzio" written on all my covers, and I remained in love with… beauty par excellence . And the wonderfully captivating, slow Adagietto from the Fifth by the high-romantic Gustav Mahler , which concludes the film, still makes me sink into vibrant melancholy and emotion.