Quest Status: 753 / 1000
TSPDT Rank #975
I haven't seen most of Luchino Visconti's movies for close to ten years, when I was still in the midst of my initial obsession with film. In those days, I devoured movies morning, noon and night - often using a portable DVD player to fill every waking minute of time with movies. Regrettably, legendary Visconti masterpieces like The Leopard and Death By Venice are among the ones that I remember watching on that device for the first and only time. So when I come to a movie like Ludwig, it feels like I'm coming to Visconti with a blank slate to fill with new impressions (even though there are a few of his movies that I've digested properly).
Ludwig starts out as a sane movie about an eccentric and somewhat childlike king, and over the course of four hours, slides slowly into increasingly colorful and sprawling excess. This mirrors the journey of its subject: the "Mad King" Ludwig II of Bavaria. At first, his exploits consist mainly of spending huge sums on his patronage of Richard Wagner, who staged Tristan and Isolde for the first time on Ludwig's dime. As the film progresses, however, Ludwig starts building castles with underground ponds and swan boats, while also opting for illicit homosexual affairs with male aids rather than marrying and continuing the royal lineage.
An Italian-German co-production with an international cast (who spoke in English and had their lines dubbed in Italian after the fact), Ludwig was initially cut down to a less decadent length and sanitized for mass consumption, but it really needed to be four hours long in order to properly convey the king's slow descent into madness. What it didn't need were the occasional faux-documentary asides where ministers from Ludwig's government talk candidly about their disapproval (or, occasionally, approval) of the monarch's ruling style. It may have seemed like a fashionable idea at the time, but the rest of the film is more than able to convey these ideas on its own.
--- 247 films remaining ---
NOTE
This review is part of my new Tumblr blog Cinema Cycles, which can be found here.
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