50 years ago, Björn Andrésen was plucked from obscurity to star in Visconti’s Death in Venice and hailed “the most beautiful boy in the world”
In a grisly scene mid-way through the pagan horror, a commune elder with long grey hair and a wispy beard launches himself off a cliff and crumples onto the rocks below. Barely alive, his fellow cult members take turns to smash his face in with a giant mallet. It’s an easter-egg of a casting choice, because 50 years ago, that face – now weathered and gaunt but still startlingly arresting – was declared the most beautiful in the world.was 15 years old in 1970.
It was an imbalanced match, to say the least. Cinematic giant Count Don Luchino Visconti di Modrone was the heir of Milanese industrialists and nobility, and a formidable presence born to issue orders. Andrésen was a teenager living in a rural cabin with his grandmother, following the trauma of his mother’s suicide when he was just ten – he never knew his father.
A reluctant pop career in Japan followed, where he remembers being pursued by girls brandishing scissors to lop off his locks – and plied with unidentified pills by agents and managers to boost his courage in the face of a relentless schedule of public appearances. Later, he was put up in a Parisian apartment for a year by a wealthy older man and paraded around nightclubs. “I felt like some kind of wandering trophy,” he says. It’s a time he still prefers not to discuss.
The filmmakers spent five years gaining Andrésen’s trust. “He was not very fond of talking about this,” Petri admits. But by giving Andrésen the freedom to shape its pathways, the documentary, with its many traumatic revelations, feels as fittingly multi-layered and unconventional as its subject.
Belgique Dernières Nouvelles, Belgique Actualités
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