Ludwig

 It's a mistake to think that the merit of a film is a fixed and immutable quantity.  Movies are valued for various reasons that change with time and critical fashion.  Qualities of excellence can be found in films that failed when they were first released.  Similarly, films themselves are mutable -- they exist in various dimensions and can be re-cut to the specifications suitable for particular times and places.  With respect to these issues, Visconti's last film Ludwig is an exemplary case.

Ludwig was released in January 1973 after a vexed production.  At the time, the movie was generally derided, particularly in comparison with Hans-Jurgen Syberberg's Ludwig -- Requiem for a Virgin King, an Andy Warhol-influenced and Brechtian exercise (one that I esteem highly) featuring motorcycle gangs, yodeling, and a guillotine.  Syberberg's career, after a couple of contested masterpieces (Karl May and Hitler, A Film from Germany) declined into crypto-fascist arcana and, although he was a great film maker, he is mostly forgotten today.  By contrast, Visconti had a long and distinguished career, made some brilliant epics (The Leopard and Senso) and his reputation is once again ascendant.  Part of the rehabilitation of Visconti's late work involves a reassessment of his film maudit, Ludwig.  

Ludwig was part of a German trilogy comprised of The Damned and Death in Venice, opulent period pictures with strong homosexual elements made by the aging gay director as an interlude to his magnum opus, a film version of Proust's In Search of Lost Time that was never produced.  Visconti had two strokes while working on Ludwig, his Jupiter spotlights damaged irreplaceable tapestries at Neueschwanstein where he was filming on location, and the finished film was four hours long.  It was cut to three hours for Cannes and released in the United States and other places at a mere two hours -- by this point, slashed to an incomprehensible series of spectacular tableaux.  The film exists in a Blu-Ray edition, one of the Filmjuwelen released in Germany, and can be watched at its original four-hour length if the viewer is capable of reading German subtitles.  (The English version of the film currently costs something like $346 on E-Bay.)  

Visconti's approach to Ludwig's life is stubbornly chronological.  He starts with the boy-prince's coronation and ends on a lingering shot of the dead king, mouth agape after being fished from the waters of the lake at Herrnchiemsee.  The film is sometimes nakedly expository -- there are talking heads who appear at 15 minutes interludes to provide testimony as to what Ludwig is doing wrong (it seems he never did anything right), but, at other times, completely opaque to an American not familiar with the Bavarian King's life (and mysterious death).  Halfway through the film, I consulted Wikipedia to learn the broad contours of  Ludwig's story and construct a schematic diagdram as to the identities and family relationships of the characters.  (I never was able to sort out the various henchmen and enablers in Ludwig's ever-decreasing circle of sycophants -- they're all handsome Aryan types with reddish mustaches and blue eyes.)  I assume Europeans know this story by heart and, therefore, are satisfied to see it reenacted as a series of dramatically static tableaux, most of them invested with an almost unearthly beauty.  But there's no suspense, no drama, and no plot development, in fact, no real plot -- Ludwig just suffers, first as a supernaturally pretty youth and, then, as a ghastly-looking zombie with the pallor of Nosferatu, red-rimmed eyes, and a mouth full of spectacularly rotten teeth.  The film displays with much more force a problem that Bertolucci encountered in his far better and more moving The Last Emperor, an another estimable film from the period -- it's next to impossible to make a movie about a weak protagonist, someone on whom the forces of history act but who is powerless against his destiny.  There's no drama and the film founders in gorgeous imagery.  

At his coronation, Ludwig, then, a broodingly handsome youth (he's played by Helmut Berger), drinks too much champagne.  (There's a priceless shot of his regal and imperious Queen Mother glaring at him as he hits the bottle.)  No sooner crowned, Ludwig begins to squander his money on houses and theaters for his idol, Richard Wagner.  This allows Visconti to lard the soundtrack with fragments of the prelude to Tristan and Isolde, atmospheric music that remains, however, in the background.  (Disappointingly, we never see any Wagner productions, although Ludwig subsidized the Ring and Der Meistersinger. )  Wagner and Cosima, the maestro's girlfriend bicker with poor Ludwig about the quality of their housing (they are living in a majestic manor) and there's some kind of quarrel.  Visconti is interested in the Wagner material, but doesn't know how to develop it -- or, perhaps, shot several  hours of this stuff that had to be discarded.  But there's no dramatic arc to the subplot and about an hour after Wagner vanishes from the epic, we see a piano draped in a black veil -- apparently, in honor of Wagner who's death has occurred unannounced and off-screen.  (The great Italian beauty Silvana Mangano plays Cosima and there's a wonderful scene where parts of her Christmas present, the Siegfried Idyll are played on the steps of Wahnfried next to a beautiful Christmas tree -- this is very evocative but has absolutely no bearing on the film; Ludwig has nothing to do with this.)   Ludwig is supposed to marry but, of course, he's queer and so the film lacks anything like a romantic love-interest.  Apparently, the subject of Ludwig's sexuality is still controversial in Bavaria -- when the picture was reconstructed and first shown in a complete form in Munich in 1993, the leader of the Right Wing party Franz Joseph Strauss demanded cuts to censor some of the more overtly homosexual imagery (which is not abundant in the film) and, in fact, the movie feels repressed and coy about Ludwig's predilection for his hunky lackeys.  Certainly, there's no grand romantic passion on display in the film.  In one inadvertently risible scene, Ludwig storms into his mama's grandiose apartments and announces, as if declaring war on Austria, that he is going to marry.  But, of course, he stalls interminably and never follows through, despite a crash course in heterosexual coupling that a lusty actress vainly attempts with him (this scene is intentionally funny).  There's an off-screen war with some neighboring country and Ludwig's younger brother, Otto, ends up with post-traumatic stress disorder and, then, goes completely mad, gnawing on the arms of orderlies in the hospital.  From time to time, Ludwig's aunt, the imperious Sissi of Austria shows up on horseback and rides around with the King.  They seem to be close and it's never explained how or why Austria ends up at war with Bavaria.  Late in the film, Sissi (Empress Elisabeth) appears again, this time in a nice black coach and tours three of Ludwig's castles so we can get some sense of his building mania -- she bursts into uncontrollable laughter when she sees the imitation of the mirror hall in Versailles in one of his castles.  But Ludwig, holed up in the tower at Neuschwanstein, never deigns to meet her and the scenes go nowhere.  (Romy Schneider reprises her famous role of Sissi in a series of kitschy movies made in Austria between 1955 and 1957 -- these are the roles that made her an international sensation in Europe.  She's attractive but has nothing to do in the movie.)  The last hour of the film is devoted to the plot to establish a regency over Bavaria on the basis of allegations that Ludwig was insane and destroying the country with his lavish expenditures.  (This was largely untrue -- although eccentric, Ludwig doesn't seem psychotic until the conspiracy pushes him over the edge and he built his lavish castles using his own money.)  The conspirators appear at Neuschwanstein as a legion of somberly dressed middle-aged men with umbrellas -- they aren't too menacing.  Ludwig fulminates against them and cries out that he will pluck out their eyes;  instead, he imprisons them in one of the fairy-tale towers in the castle and denies them their supper.  Ultimately, he's seized and dragged away to a manor house near a foggy lake.  The conspirators have engaged a prominent alienist to write a report attesting to Ludwig's madness, Herr Doctor von Gudden (he is played by Heinz Moog, a Third Reich actor, and the sinister figure who tormented Karl May in Syberberg's film of that name made a couple years later.)  Gudden seems uncertain as to whether Ludwig is crazy.  They go for a walk together and don't return.  There's lot of rain (and snow) in this movie and the two men go missing in a thunderstorm.  Legions of extras with smoking torches in the rain search for von Gudden and Ludwig.  At last, they find their corpses in waist-deep water in the lake.  To this day, no one knows what happened at Lake Stamberg.  (Reportedly Visconti opted for the assassination by gunfire theory -- there's a little trace of this in the movie when one of Ludwig's tormentors takes a revolver and says he will shoot...although only as signal and just one signal shot when the two men are found.  A few minutes later, we hear two shots.  Cut from the film was a scene in which someone remarks on a bullet-hole in Ludwig's body.)  In his last speech, Ludwig has said that he wants to remain an enigma to the world (and to himself) an ambition the film respects.  Ludwig is all exterior and surface -- we never find out what's inside of  him.

There are several remarkable sequences but they largely rely on the actual locations constructed by the Mad King.  The swan grotto with its color-filtered lights, artificial stalactites and lake, complete with waterfall, is fantastic -- although nothing really happens in that place.  Glowering, Ludwig is just rowed around the little lake in his Lohengrin-inspired swan-boat.  Later, we see a homosexual orgy (or its aftermath, a bunch of handsome youths in lederhosen lying around spent under a huge artificial tree -- this is Hunding's Hut room in Ludwig's castle at Linderhof (also the site of the Lohengrin grotto). A folk song is sung, Ludwig again glowers at everyone from under his black porkpie hat with upcurled brim, and, then, someone plays a plaintive scene on the accordion; the sequence looks like an outtake from Guy Maddin's The Saddest Movie in the World -- it's beautiful and ridiculous at the same time.  Viewed from a distance of almost 50 years, Visconti's film, static and non-narrative, is not that much different from Syberberg's overtly avant-garde epic -- both films are swamped in decor and Wagnerian music.  The difference is that Syberberg's picture is Brechtian and makes a political point -- Ludwig's madness ended with him essentially selling Bavaria to the Prussians.  It is, in Syberberg's imagination, the perverse alliance of Bavarian romanticism with Prussian arms that produced the Nazis.  (And he proceeds to demonstrate this with the latter two films in his own trilogy, Karl May and Hitler, a Film from Germany).  There's nothing in Visconti's film that packs the emotional charge of some of Syberberg's inventions -- particularly, the ending sequences filmed with hidden camera showing Americans gawking at Ludwig's castles.  Visconti has no thesis and the film feels perfunctory. The lavish locations prevent the camera from moving and most often Visconti emphasizes points like a Hong Kong film maker -- that is, by a zoom into the image.  Somehow, the actual locations feel as if they imprison the picture.  The movie is self-consciously important -- for instance, the first performance of a late Wagner piano score takes place in the film -- but it's fatally flawed.  The acting can't really be judged.  The movie was made with an international cast (for instance, Wagner is played by Trevor Howard) and was shot in Europe's lingua franca, English.  The film was, then, dubbed into Italian.  The Italian was, then, dubbed into German in the version that I saw and so I have no idea whether the line-readings are effective or not --  probably not on the basis of what I saw.  (Curiously, German subtitles translate everything into the second-person "du" or familiar case (thou) -- used, as Germans say, to address your children, your mistress, your pets and God; this is because the verb forms for the du case are much shorter and the subtitles, therefore, can be more easily read -- but, if you know some German, it's disconcerting to hear everyone addressed as Sie and subtitled as du.)