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Rating: "Eine Mann! eine richtige Mann!!!" is the cry of Helmut Berger en travesti imitating Marlene Dietrich in the Blue Angel the symbol of this work that oozes decadence, melodrama, beauty, and violence in every shot.
Visconti had planned to stage a sort of Macbeth that would take place in the Milanese upper bourgeoisie, which later, thanks to his readings of his beloved Germanic writers, he would set in the German bourgeoisie of Nazism. In doing so, the maestro does not want to create a historical film but a film where he can converge his memories, the novels and music he loves, and the attitude of the Lombard upper class towards fascism.
One of the sources of this masterpiece is Wagner and his Götterdämmerung: the title indeed recalls the composer’s opera as well as the flames at the opening and during the film when there’s the “purification” burning of the books by authors of degenerate art like Thomas Mann and melodrama, in fact, the film is an immense family melodrama, where the characters start by sitting at the table in their elegant clothes as a proper bourgeois family, then end up slaughtering each other for the power of the family’s steel plant. On the other hand, Visconti draws from Thomas Mann’s novel, the Buddenbrooks, which narrates the inexorable decline of a very wealthy bourgeois family: the film indeed tells how the values of the bourgeoisie, patriarchy, and family are overwhelmed by the Nazi wave and then by the Nibelung spirit of irrationality, greed, violence, and passions.
The story begins with a refined family gathering with the characters ready to play their roles, and here we see all the master’s talent with sublime camera movements, using zooms and panoramas he presents all the characters already showing us their attitude towards the newborn Third Reich: from the opportunistic patriarch convinced of new profits thanks to fascism’s support, the ambiguous Martin, the corrupt and inept heir of the family played by Helmut Berger in his best role, to the mother Sofia, a beautiful and wicked woman avid for power, like a new Kriemhild (the scene in an elegant boudoir while planning the seizure of power with the lover is stunning) perfectly portrayed by Ingrid Thulin, and the calculating lover Friedrich, interpreted by the great Dirk Bogarde, and above all these dominates Aschenbach, the Nazi officer who with a diabolical grin manipulates all characters to subject them to Nazi power; the few "positive" characters remain in the background, faded (like the one played by Charlotte Rampling) as if there were no possibility of redemption. The placid calm of the gathering is broken by ferocious arguments for the presidency of the steelworks, which continue throughout the film intertwining with the Nazi takeover. In the end, power will lead to the unleashing of dark and violent passions that governed the symbiotic relationship between the mother Sofia and Martin in a reckoning with a grotesque and funeral finale.
Visconti shows the falsity of ceremonies, every ceremony, every appearance hides violence and abuse: family gatherings (each time missing someone who has been killed) are occasions for clashes, as is the final funeral marriage, stunning and worthy of an expressionist painting, which the master draws inspiration from the suicide of Hitler and his lover. Likewise, all the sexual transgressions, which ooze throughout the film, are always bearers of violence and crime: with the degradation of Nazism everything becomes possible, and morality is dead.
Worth mentioning, in addition to the sublime use of Wagner's music, is the expressionist use of lights, evoking the atmosphere of the 1930s and some old Ufa films, with some faces illuminated in yellow, green, and the dominating red and black throughout the film, reaching a climax in the "Night of the Long Knives," where Visconti wants to describe the clash within the Nazi family between SA and SS: here too from an infernal and smoky atmosphere of loud partying that degrades into a cold orgy among soldiers, the black and compact silhouettes of the SS counterpose, arriving to massacre their Nazi "relatives," all then ending in a silent and clean dawn.
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