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Mahler By Tom Keogh
From its stunning opening sequence, featuring Georgina Hale (who plays
the wife of Gustav Mahler in this Ken Russell film) isolated in full mummy
wrap and writhing with erotic yearning to the lush strains of her
husband's music, Mahler distinguishes itself as the most poetic and
archetypal of Russell's great-composer works. A kind of cinematic response
to Luchino Visconti's 1971 adaptation of Death
in Venice, in which Dirk Bogarde plays a Mahler-esque composer in
search of beauty in the plague-filled city, Mahler stars Robert
Powell as the great Jewish romantic from 19th-century Vienna, drafting
enormous symphonic works in the midst of rising anti-Semitism. Converting
to Christianity as a means of survival, Mahler carries on with his work
but experiences an erosion of his health and sense of identity. Meanwhile,
his self-effacing spouse represses her own creative drives to keep the
resident genius afloat, plugging every leak and receding all but invisible
into the woodwork. While the film is the least ostentatious of Russell's
movies about music, it is hardly conventional, a mix of lyrical tableaux
and comic fantasy that adds up to a stirring, dreamlike experience.
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