La pasión de un rey

Luchino Visconti's masterpiece - beautifully restored to the full 4 hours+ length on dvd in Germany - is breathtaking due to the Maestro's imprints alone. We see lush castle's, gold glitter, men in black or silver talking morals, and persons fighting their destiny ... and loose. Ludwig has something extra though: never seen the 110% Englishman Trevor Howard better as the very German Richard Wagner. And words will never be enough for yet another brilliant role of Romy Schneider, portraying Elisabeth rather than her renowned Sissy here.

The sheer brilliance of Visconti comes to light with the performance of Helmut Berger. Quite known as an actor in both Italy and the German speaking territories, he really goes above and beyond in his role as King Ludwig, the boy destined to drown in himself as a man.

Please do not miss this superb film, even though the bilingual (Italian-German) DVD of Kinowelt/Arthaus silly enough doesn't give any English subtitles.

This long and lavish biopic of the mad Mittel European monarch is both Luchino Visconti's grandest and - oddly enough - his most intimate and personal film. Visconti's autobiography in all but name, it tells the story of a cultured aristocrat who ruins himself through an obsessive love of art, luxury and handsome young men. The film paints King Ludwig as a well-meaning but hapless victim of his grasping courtiers, artists and lovers. If Visconti himself was an arch-manipulator and a bit of a sadist, well...Ludwig is one of those films where life and art never do quite match up.

Most revealing is its portrayal of the aging king's obsession with a pretty but none-too-talented actor, Joseph Kainz. It is tempting to view their romance as a mirror of Visconti's own passion for the exquisite Helmut Berger, who - a twist within a twist - actually stars as King Ludwig in this film. In the roles he played without Visconti as his Svengali, Berger is barely competent. In Ludwig (as in The Damned) he gives a staggering performance, ranging from fresh-faced idealism to homoerotic heartbreak to bloated waste.

Shot just after the collapse of Visconti's long-cherished film of Proust, Ludwig is rich in characters who reflect (whether consciously or not) the gilded Belle Epoque monsters that haunt the pages of A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu. As the Empress Elisabeth of Austria, poor Ludwig's magnetic but manipulative cousin, Romy Schneider might just as well be playing the Duchesse de Guermantes. The opportunistic composer Richard Wagner (Trevor Howard) and his scheming wife Cosima (Silvana Mangano) stand in as the vulgar social-climbing Verdurins. The king himself is a kindred spirit of the Baron de Charlus - a doomed aesthete who refined tastes are at odds with his sordid love-life.

With its majestic cast and flawless photography and design, Ludwig has all the makings of a screen masterpiece. Alas, it falters badly in its last hour - which depicts the bourgeois conspiracy that topples Ludwig from his throne. Perhaps Visconti (who identified so closely with the mad monarch) could not face up to the waning of his own powers. He suffered a crippling stroke after finishing this film, and would never again attempt work on such a scale. Ludwig stands as a flawed testament - as a portrait of one enigma by another.

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In this last part of his German trilogy, Visconti delves the most into the human psyche, and in particular it's contradictory forces within. On one hand the self-destructive urge for physical pleasure, on the other the spiritual search for the sublime. The Dionysean and the Apollonian. Body and soul.

Ludwig II, aka the "mad" king of Bavaria, is dragged to the limits by these two opposite forces. Losing focus on a vulgar reality, he surrenders to sexual perversion and yet also to a search for artistic purity, eventually leading him to madness, and finally to death. Trying in vein to find the sublime and eternal kingdom of the literary heroes he craves for, his behavior becomes more and more erratic until he is violently dethroned (a recurring theme in Visconti's work: the fall of aristocracy and the rise of bourgeois democracy).

Visconti directs this paradox with a highly elegant style, influenced by the romanticism of painters like Caspar David Friedrich and Frederic Edwin Church. The movie reaches a climax at around the third hour, when Ludwig and his protégé Joseph Kainz travel together through the endless frozen night, so that Ludwig shows Kainz his "real kingdom, the mountains under the moonlight, a world for ourselves, pure and uncontaminated". "Think about your soul, not about your body" Ludwig tells him. This a last hurrah. After Kainz's rejection, Ludwig declines further in decay and resignation.

The events depicting the conspiracy that dethrones him are grotesquely-staged and almost out of sync, emphasizing Ludwig's confusion and ill mental-state. Knowing his downfall is near, he confesses to one of the staff how he believes in the immortality of the soul and God's justice. "I've read many things about materialism", he says, "but it will never satisfy a man, cause he doesn't want to be put in the same level as beasts". That's a rare confession for Visconti.

After he is captured, the film once again alters in style, to a kind of austere chamber-cinema with a funereal feel. Near the end (and his death), Ludwig says to psychiatrist professor Gudden: "There is nothing more beautiful and fascinating than the night. They say the cult of the night, of the moon, is a maternal cult. The cult of sun, of daytime, is a masculine myth, therefore paternal. However the mystery, the greatness of night, for me lie in the infinite sublime kingdom of the heroes, which is also the kingdom of reason. Poor Dr. Gudden, you are forced to study me from dawn to dusk and from dusk to dawn. But I am an enigma, and I want to be an enigma forever, for the world and for myself".

Just like man. Sublime.

I have not seen the highly edited 180 minute version of Ludwig, available in the US. However, I am lucky enough to have seen the full 4 hour and 7 minute version available on DVD in Germany. Alas, there are no English subtitles or soundtracks, but my mother is fluent in German and so I was able to get a line by line translation!

And my GOD, was it worth it. Although I felt it was a little slow in places, I was utterly drawn in to Ludwig's world as the film progressed. I can't speak for the US video version, but the full cut is divided into 5 parts. As each part comes and goes, we are steadily immersed into the world of Ludwig II (Helmut Berger in compelling form once more, as he was in Visconti's The Damned [1969]). Ludwig has often been dismissed as "mad", but this film really lets you identify and understand the tormented man's life. One cannot help being on the verge of tears in sympathy towards the end of Part IV, when Ludwig is hiding in his absurdly decadent and expensive castle and Elisabeth (Romy Schnieder) tries to visit him. Wagner's Tristan und Isolde blazes on the soundtrack and he cannot bear to be seen by her in his state. He cries out her name repeatedly and sinks down on the ground. Some people have criticised Berger for being too melodramatic (Helmut 'Ham'-Berger one review once said), but he is perfect in this role. Not only does he strongly resemble the original Ludwig, but his acting is spot-on for capturing Ludwig's romantic and highly emotional personality.

This film deals with many themes that Visconti continually returned to in his career. It was made after his planned film based on Proust's epic masterpiece 'In Search of Lost Time' fell through (and what wouldn't I give for Visconti to have made that film!!) and might be seen to contain similar themes. There is decadence, decay, decline, homosexuality, and music. Not only is this film a fine study of historical events (the 'wars of Unification' in 1866 and 1870-1), but also of art and music (Ludwig's relationship with Wagner and the influence of Wagnerian art on his life), and of Ludwig's own highly-strung personality.

In short, this is yet another Visconti masterpiece. It's a CRIME that no-one has given this film a DVD release in its restored (or even any other) form in the US or the UK. The film was also filmed in English, but no English soundtrack is available on the German DVD, or subtitles. Again, this is another example of Visconti's work being overlooked and ignored - the sound quality is also not what it could be (the sound quality on the German track being DIABOLICAL, as opposed to the good Italian track). This film TRULY deserves a proper DVD release - music, direction, acting, and script are superb and this film deserves a far wider audience than it is allowed to receive. At least the German DVD is in the correct aspect ratio (2.35 : 1) as this film deserves to be seen in it's full glory (sets - most the real locations - and costumes are utterly stunning). I urge anyone who reads this to see Ludwig - even if one must resort to a horribly cut VHS version (how can you loose a whole HOUR from this film?!!). This is another Visconti masterpiece and cries out for a better and more widely available DVD release.

As a deeply interest on European's history, I'd already knew about this mad king of the Bavaria a long time ago, Ludwig just came at my hands this years and was too long, then I had decided spent the last friday night watching this restored Visconti's masterpiece, what a great movie indeed, but the cut off version stayed lame and was a flop at release time, assembled again it's was the closest that they could get as early Visconti's concept, the king Ludwig was presented as a lunatic man for arts, sponsored the financial excesses of Richard Wagner, and drained the already rundown Bavaria's treasury on those useless Castles which he dares to build in exchange of the penury of his people, also Visconti alludes the decaying process of a King who wasn't linked with reality at all, he living in a parallel world as screened, plus Visconti was visionary when cast Helmut Berger whose had an extremely sameness with the real Ludwig, what a lucky, just mourns a small appearance of Sissi (Romy Schneider) on the plot for obvious reasons, furthermore exposes the odd Ludwig's weakness as his shy behavior and how he handles with your latent homosexuality as well, the history as a whole teach us that the ordinary statesmen rarely go down in history, instead those mad rulers that through their wacky minds were often recalled, aside be too long more than four hours the picture doesn't tired me, due so valuable asset to understand the German merger and how it really did happens, it gave me priceless clues for whom Germany deserves his unification, apart the Ludwig the mad the movie brings to light the German's history!!

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First watch: 2020 / How many: 1 / Source: DVD / Rating: 9