The story of King Ludwig II of Bavaria, a romantic and idealist, a lover of beauty and harmony. As a young boy, after hearing Wagner’s opera Lohengrin, he was fascinated by the romantic world of heroes, legends and ideal love. Since coming to power, Ludwig has wholeheartedly supported Wagner’s creative genius, but his unrequited love for the Austrian princess Elisabeth fosters unhealthy passions.
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The film is beautiful, and at the same time so bitter that it seems unbearable for a healthy psyche to watch this 4-hour agony, death and immersion into the nothingness of the Beautiful. And, nevertheless, you watch it – painfully spellbound, swaying slightly with nausea and tenderness, holding your breath, as if you were touching a naked nerve or seeing the funeral of someone you did not know much in life, but at that moment you realize that you always would have loved to meet, but now it’s too late… And it’s always been late, and you didn’t know… Every frame, every camera turn, the fantastic interiors and costumes and music give the viewer a literal sense of the strangely oppressive atmosphere of the autistic world of longing and madness. There are people who, feeling the doom of their culture in their skin, can transmit that feeling as a chain to others, even those far removed from it.
The hereditary Duke Visconti, who devoted himself to the most democratic of the arts, was more successful than anyone in his impressive requiems for a refined culture dying under the onslaught of the new barbaric times. After all, there are things that can only be understood from within, and one of the first and last representatives of the “Golden Age of Cinematography”, judging by his many statements, perceived the decline of this very Golden Age, the transformation of cinema into an attraction, and people into milking machines and the coming of a new vulgar culture, personally and extremely painfully. True, if he had lived to this day, he would probably have hardly used the word “culture” in reference to the finally victorious reality. But here Visconti is hard even to reproach Visconti for snobbery, although he was entitled to it – apart from the parallels between the history of a hundred years ago and today, he is, just as in his first films devoted to the life of the “bottom”, interested primarily in the psychological aspect – “I love to tell stories of defeat, to describe lonely souls, destructions of reality” – as he himself will say about “Ludwig”.
The film begins with iconic images – the beautiful, spiritual face of the newly crowned monarch, the renaissance dreams of the kingdom of beauty, the dawn of the sciences and arts and so on, so on. And from the very first lines of Helmut Berger, as usual resembling a fallen angel sent to the hell of earthly haphazardness as punishment for his pride, from his nervous gestures, from his particularly feisty gait, it becomes clear that we are faced with a protagonist of the film, that this man will lead us wherever he wants. Only this appearance remains an appearance. And if Berger succeeds in dragging the audience through all the circles of hell, put to his character, the real Ludwig of Bavaria is not able to get one step closer to the Dream. How to explain him a beautiful girl, cousin Elisabeth, future Empress of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (Romy Schneider): love and duty are incompatible phenomena, the belief in the kinship of the chosen souls, destroyed by the intrigues and petty calculations of the composer Wagner, ungracious, unchivalrous war around, the treasury ruined by the realization of His Majesty’s mania (yes, yes, let us call things by their names), and the Kingdom of Beauty proved too far away to sacrifice mercantile interests for it. This is always the case in this dull world inhabited by people devoid of romance.
“The world around us is disgustingly shallow. People dream only of material prosperity and are willing to pursue it all their lives. I, on the other hand, want to be free. To dream the impossible. I try to do things the way I think they should be done. That’s why I’ve distanced myself from this idiotic war that I failed to prevent. I’m not a coward or a scoundrel… I hate lies and I want to live honestly…” – he will say. But what he will hear in reply will not please him at all – “Power is always limited to the boundaries of the human society to which it belongs. Who can follow beyond those boundaries? Certainly not the wretched little people, bent on finding the material and moral sustenance of their existence, about whom you spoke with such disdain. And so? You will be followed by those who understand this ideal freedom as the freedom of debauchery. The vilest plebeians and scum, the most depraved scoundrels…” A wall rises between him and the vulgar, coarse world, he loses power, first of all over himself, and closes in his worship of ideals, needed by no one – the most terrible of all kinds of loneliness… From such loneliness, usually sooner or later, one is knocked upwards: either into beauty or into death…
Visconti, as an experienced psychologist, is completely neutral, not judging or justifying anyone, but diagnosing and trying to investigate the causes that led to the extinction of the gods and romantic heroes. The fact that loneliness, emptiness and uncommunicativeness are spoken about on a universal scale in whispered and silent, in images that defy verbalization, makes an even more pained impression. The film is like a cardiogram – heartbeats alternate with pauses, and ends in a straight line. The diagnosis is simple: in the new Bismarckian Germany, the “swan king” Ludwig has no place. The old world is doomed, all civilizations are ultimately doomed, and the purest, bluest blood, the result of many generations of marriages of close relatives, sooner or later becomes one of the signs of extinction. This is emphasized by the theme of the younger brother, the boy who took upon himself all the burdens that the king had neglected, a knowingly impossible burden, which he courageously bore, and was legitimately torn under its weight.
The director is interested in Ludwig, himself, the type of man – by nature humane, intelligent, trusting, honest and well-bred – the portrait of the ideal monarch turns out, who, paradoxically enough, thanks to all these qualities was not needed by his state. At the time, in a sense, he is flawed and corrupted, because at the height to which he has driven himself, all human and moral principles do not work. But Ludwig, with his air castles, who has reached the limits of his idealism, is much more sympathetic to those who will replace him in the “iron” nineteenth century, the twentieth century, which has become a golden age. After all, Visconti saw the absence of a system of values and ideals, the denial of culture, as a sign of incipient fascism, which he hated so much.
Swan songs are always sad – the fairy tale has given way to harsh reality, but it has left its mark on the earth… Modern Bavarians treat Ludwig as a saint and live off the tourists who come to see those very fantastic castles, the embodiment of the king’s sophisticated ideals, which caused the state treasury to go bankrupt during his lifetime. Yes, Ludwig of Bavaria would lose all his wars with the century. He was treated cruelly, not even given the death he deserved, but he went away enigmatic as he wanted and won on points. History stirs the imagination more than any fiction and the last Don Quixote in history will long be remembered as a reminder that there is more to this material world than…. Such do not lose.
Info Blu-ray
Video
Codec: HEVC / H.265
Resolution: Native 4K (2160p)
HDR: HDR10
Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
Audio
Italian: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Mono
Italian: Dolby Digital 2.0
French: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Mono
Subtitles
English, French.
