Lisztomania

Franz Liszt (Roger Daltrey) is a hedonistic composer in old Europe. In real life, the Hungarian musician lived from 1811 to 1886. Richard Wagner is a music associate. Ringo Starr plays The Pope.

This is surrealistic biopic. It can be seen as a mess, self-indulgent, and undecipherable. It can also be seen as intriguing and challenging. I choose to see it as the later. It's definitively not safe. I prefer a mess more than an uninteresting bland biopic. As an actor, Daltrey is not that great but his rock star personality is undeniable. Ken Russell is throwing a lot into this. It's a lot and it runs a bit long. I wish it wraps up a little sooner. Wagner needs to have more scenes as the antagonist. I would also like a bigger better actor playing him. He doesn't have to be a real musician. All in all, this is at least interesting.

Ken Russell did have some interesting ideas that came across as entertaining but there were times where his style got ahead of him and the film in question, and Lisztomania epitomises a bit of both. Lisztomania is definitely a polarising film, people will find it wonderfully weird while others will find it tasteless. With me, both seem to be here which is the main reason why the film is not an easy one to rate. If you are looking for a biographical drama, look elsewhere, the first half does have a story to it(more than likely to be fictionalised though) but the second half is like you've having a long really surreal dream and the characters are merely parodies. There are some striking visuals that are colourful and surreal while the music is pulsating and catchy and there is evidence of wit and imaginative touches like the homage to Charlie Chaplin and Hammer films, the fantasy interlude, Liszt's arrival at the castle and the Frankenstein figure(though that may also come under vulgar too because it's Wagner and the Nazis). Fiona Lewis and Veronica Quilligan are good as well. Some of it can feel music-video-like though- much of the second half has very little plot and feels like an excuse to string different vignettes together with a lot of tone shifts- and while the special effects are mostly okay the spaceship is rather fake. Lisztomania does change tone a lot and some of the shifts come without warning and feel very chaotic and there are some touches that are vulgar like the piano torture machine, the giant penis, sex scenes at high speed, Nazi iconography. Not entirely which category the vaginal fantastic voyage comes under, visually it was imaginative but there was a real weirdness as well, the same could be said of the most unique version of the Pope you will ever see. Most of the acting is really not very good, Paul Nicholas is pretty awful, Ringo Starr has a naturalness but doesn't have much to do and Roger Daltry is rather dull. Russell has shown with his Elgar and Delius biographies that he can be restrained and Mahler also(though also with some outrageous images), but Lisztomania is the prime example that I've seen of his filmography where restraint and subtlety go completely out the window, and at times it can feel heavy-handed. Overall, very difficult to rate but is unlike many other films seen before, personally not entirely sure whether I liked or disliked it, most likely to be neither. 5/10 Bethany Cox

To many, this film is the stunning-proof that director Ken Russell never had it, and that idiocy and egotism were mistaken for genius. You could say mistaking idiocy and egotism for genius has been the appeal of rock music! Others might say that Russell is simply childish or immature, and that his films are the "masturbatory-fantasies" of an overgrown-adolescent. This belief is unfounded. Is this film over-indulgent? Yes it is, dear readers, very-much-so, because it is art, not entertainment. That-said, if you chuck any expectations, this is a funny film and allegory about the rise of pop-culture in the 19th Century. It draws parallels between Liszt's fame with the other generally-hollow spectacle known as "rock." This is great film-making, and it should be noted that it has similarities between itself and "Rocky Horror," and even "Hedwig and the Angry Inch," as they all examine and explore the relationships between sexuality and pop-culture in similar-areas. It really is true that women threw their underwear at Franz Liszt during his performances, and that he had many-many lovers--groupies.

Lisztomania is an odd bridge-between "classic" rock and the emergent punk-movement of the time. The film can also be seen as a statement that "rock" is not really subversive or rebellious at-all, but ultimately arch-conservative, and repressive. Amen. It's just a hilarious, wild-romp that will make your guests extremely nervous, which films should do. Movies should challenge people to think and reflect--at-least occasionally. Ironically (or maybe-not!), Mr. Russell had contracted Malcolm MacLaren and Vivienne Westwood to design the S&M-costumes for his film, "Mahler." It should also-be-noted that "Liszt-o-Mania" was released exactly the same year that MacLaren's shop "SEX" opened on King's Row, the rest is as they say, is history. It couldn't be more camp, it has Little Nell in it.

Basically-put, this is about the the ins-and-outs of "why" we want and need pop-culture, and WHAT we generally-want from our "pop-idols" (sex, of-course). One could easily-say this film criticizes the absurd spectacle that rock had become by 1975, and we get this quite-often in the film. But this theme goes much-deeper, into the relationship-between artist and patron (once, just the aristocracy, now the mob is added). The sexuality is about mass-psychology, too, so Wilhelm Reich gets-his-due, and there is a plethora of Freudian-imagery. It is certainly a very-personal film for Russell, and probably amuses him as much as it does myself that it enrages so-many critics, but it should be noted that some of the absurdity and excess came from the producer of the film, not Mr. Russell. Ken Rusell enrages all the right-people, and that's what some film-making should be.

God love this lapsed-Catholic, and God love his ways. A flawed part of his canon, but very watchable and educational. As Russell began his career doing documentaries and impressionistic-films on composers for the BBC, it makes-sense that this is considered one of his most heretical-works. He complains about the opening country-song in his autobiography 'Altered States', and there were other aspects of the production he didn't want in the film. It's interesting to note that the 1980s was the period of his purest-work, due mainly to a three-picture-deal with Vestron. The 1970s were actually a very mixed-bag for him, as Lisztomania attests. He isn't entirely-pleased with it, but had some fun with the material, and there it is. I think it's a hoot, which means it isn't on DVD.

The film suffers from atrocious vulgarization in very bad style and taste throughout, which is a pity, because the idea is not bad at all. Liszt and Wagner are portrayed in gross caricature, which they were already while they were alive and kicking, and just like the 19th century caricatures even these modern ones do not miss their target and actually pinpoint some obvious truths about these the greatest divas among composers in monstrous vanity and atrocious hubris. Liszt was the more sympathetic and actually fell a prey and victim to the ruthlessness of Wagner ending up as a trophy in his graveyard, while the depicting of Wagner as a vampire and prelude to Hitler, his Frankenstein monster, is not altogether maladroit. In certain aspects it actually hits the nail. The unnecessary hooliganism of the film is the corruption of the music, which really is very little Liszt and Wagner but the more Rick Wakeman in horrible disfigurement in pop and rock versions. This is not a music film or any kind of biography or documentation of great composers but rather a twisted parasitic phantasmagoria tearing classical music apart and more or less destroying it. Ringo Starr as a pope with Liverpool accent doesn't make things any better. It isn't even funny but only stupid and disgusting. although a few laughs must out. Still, because of the idea, the imagination, the great camera work and the brilliant fireworks entertainment, I have to give it 5, which is the lowest I ever rated a film here, and I am very doubtful whether I will see any other of Ken Russell's films on music, no matter how much I appreciated his "Valentino".

19th century castration fantasy--delineating the extravagance of Hungarian composer Franz Liszt's sex-saturated young life until his eventual death by the symbolic stabbing of a voodoo needle (a myriad of maladies in actual life)--done-up in the spirit of a naughty British schoolboy bored by his classical lessons and entertaining himself by looking up his music teacher's skirts. Writer-director Ken Russell's cartoon-strip nightmare begins promisingly, with a hilarious slapstick joust between Liszt and his lover's husband, the Count d'Agoult (it's a naked swashbuckler, like something from an inventive blue movie). But soon it becomes apparent that Russell's vision is going to be all a pastiche, from silent movies to "Frankenstein" to German Expressionism to bows of unassuming self-reverence. The surreality of Russell's concept doesn't even make sense in the mad forum he has created--there's a narrative thread, yet nothing hangs together--while the creative production design upstages most of the actors. *1/2 from ****