Of note is the sad passing this week at age 70 of Bjorn Andresen, who at age 15 was an internationally acclaimed teen star of the classic 1971 art film by Lucino Visconti based on Nobel Prize-winner Thomas Mann’s autobiographical novella, “Death of Venice.” The story was about an obsession an older man developed for a beautiful teenage boy he encountered on a vacation in 1911.
Andresen’s life peaked with that performance. He was eaten, metaphorically speaking, at that age, as was the character he portrayed in the movie, the young Tadzio, who was a real-life person that Gilbert Adair wrote about in his 2001 book, “The Real Tadzio: Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and the Boy Who Inspired It.” It was a mini-biography of one Wladyslaw (Adzio) Moes, the real boy who inspired Mann’s character of Tadzio.
Before passing, Andresen vocalized his bitterness over being chosen and allegedly exploited by Visconti for the role in the film, and expressed it through a 2021 documentary entitled, “The Most Beautiful Boy in the World.” He claimed in interviews from four years ago in the documentary that Visconti’s parading him around as the world’s “most beautiful boy” to promote his film had a profoundly negative impact on the rest of his life.
Andresen spent his adult life as a Stockholm-based violinist who rarely and barely dabbled in movies. The real Tazdio (Adzio), born to an Polish aristocratic family, grew up to fight in the 1919 Polish-Soviet war, and suffer the travails of being in Poland in 1939 when World War II broke out, jailed for a half-dozen years by the Nazis and then distrusted and closely monitored by the Soviets after the war for the rest of his life. Adzio became aware of the 1971 film and its depiction of him, but only recalled that “an old man stared at him wherever he went that summer in Venice.”
In both cases, of Bjorn and of Adzio, what became of their lives, compared to the relative splendor of their youths, was nothing compared to those younger years. While Mann wrote the novella as the case of a classical composer’s unrelenting descent into obsession with beauty even with some satanic symbolism, a more universal appreciation, as I wrote about it in the Berkeley Barb in 1971, could be found from the standpoint of the just-awakening Gay Liberation movement of that day.
The predicament of the film, I wrote, was the inability of the older man, the composer Gustav Von Aschenbach substituting for the author in the novel (some say Mann based the character on the composer Gustav Mahler, whose music plays throughout the film, especially the adagietto from his Fifth Symphony), to communicate with the younger, the fact that he never says a word to him to the very end. The reason was the lack of a language of gay liberation, I wrote, of a way for Von Aschenbach to address his desire to provide for the youth a pathway for his life to avoid the pitfalls of dull, mundane adulthood, which is really what he was motivated to do. As I later wrote in my collection of essays, “Extraordinary Hearts” (2011), it was as if the lad looked back at Von Aschenbach and silently asked, “Aren’t you going to save me?”
We cannot prevent our aging, except in our minds, our brains. In our minds, we retain the capacity to be forever renewed and young. Our brains are our compatibility with the entirety of creation, each of us with as many neurons as there are stars in our galaxy. The sole aspect of our brains that are visible in our appearance are our eyes. They remain young as the rest of us age.
The most compelling scene of the film, “Titanic” (1997) is when the camera closed in on the eyes of the heroine played by Kate Winslet, Rose at age 16, and then pulled back on them to show Rose at age 100 as played by Gloria Stuart. While every aspect of the heroine’s appearance changed, the eyes remained the same.
So with our minds, our souls. Retaining a youthful zest for life is our precious, lovely gift.
