i was looking forward to this film. the trailer held the promise of a fascinating, visually rich voyage into the mind and life of the painter gustav klimt, an Austrian Symbolist painter and one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Art Nouveau. the scenes previewed in the trailer give us brief, but tantalizing glimpses into the substance of his art--an image as reflected in the shards of a broken mirror, a beautiful woman who slams the door and leaves kimpt in a room swirling with little bits of gold leaf. but the promise was far better than the realization.
in a very early scene of the film the camera moves in a continuous circle as it pans a group of men and women at an elegant turn-of-the century gathering where klimt is being honored. we see bearded and mustached gents pontificating in stuffy sentences about what is art: what is beautiful, what is not, what is necessary, and what is not. klimt roams through the lot as if in some kind of parallel universe. and we, the audience, are subjected to the annoying circling of the camera. as if we are standing on the outer edge of a carousel watching the world from that perspective as it spins.
we're under siege. finally, long after it should have happened, the camera stops its roundabout movement and stays on klimt as he takes a piece of cake and presses it against the face of one of the pontificators. at last.
but unfortunately that was not a turning point in what had been such a tedious and annoying display of characters, most of whom behave in a way that is stagy, unreal, almost mad. eventually we understand the device. we are supposedly viewing the world from inside klimt's head, as he lies immobile in the asylum, uttering and repeating short phrases now and then, as if in a dream. consumed by syphilis, klimt awaits his death. and the visions we see are his.
what could have been a remarkable film about an artist whose work is sumptuous, with all the gilded elegance of the turn of the century in austria at the time (he even used small pieces of gold leaf in some of his paintings), is not. we see his models, the beautiful lithe creatures perched nude and unabashed on swings, willing participants in klimt's erotic fantasties. but such is not the case. it's a self-indulgent piece. a very good idea gone bad. if we could have seen some semblance of real events and situations, interspersed with klimt's ravings, the effect would have worked. as it was, we are annoyed, impatient, wanting the actors who seem to be
acting that they are acting finally seqguey into some kind of truth. it never happens.
directed by raoul ruiz and starring john malkovich, klimt, the movie, is an utter disappointment, made more so by the astonishing beauty of the work of the artist and the romantic image most of us have of the time and place in which he lived.
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