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The Guardian
17 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Potato Eaters review – a descent from visceral dread into full-blown terror
There are strong Death in Venice vibes to the setting of Romeo Castellucci's site specific production at the Venice Biennale Teatro. The show, by the Italian writer-director and his company, inhabits its own island – a long, lizard-like colony. The audience boards a shuttle and skims across the water to arrive at a building that was once a lazaretto – a hospital for leprosy patients. Associations with fatal infection and social isolation are chillingly resonance of the Covid pandemic. But as you wander into this disturbing promenade piece, things turn chilly in more ways than one. The building's interior is stripped of its skin so that its brick and rafters lie bare, and there is a low electronic rumble of sound along its corridors which is as disquieting as the near darkness. Windows are boarded up, as if deliberately concealing activity inside. Further along, there are bags lying in empty rooms that at first look empty but which twitch with still-living and breathing bodies inside them. The suggestion is that of a torture chamber whose violence has taken place or will do so imminently. There is deepening alarm as you venture into this unaccounted, warehouse-like space, where, you imagine, more people lie gasping in body bags. The full terror of the show manifests in a bizarre and baroque scene of ritualised but unexplained tyranny, enacted through choreographed movement by an eight-strong cast (Luca Nava, Sergio Scarlatella, Laura Pante, Vito Ancona, Jacopo Franceschet, Marco Gagliardi, Vittorio Tommasi, Michela Valerio). A total blackness descends in a central room which is filled with thundering sound that barrels towards us (brilliantly, terrifyingly, designed by Scott and Oliver Gibbons). There is, for this cowering critic, the discomfiting feeling that things could turn genuinely dangerous within this rumbling darkness. Creepy images emerge out of smoke, from a giant winged creature – a deity, an extraterrestrial or a symbol of totalitarian terror reminiscent of the Third Reich? – to a slow-moving group of miners carrying pickaxes and a body unzipped from a bag, naked, blood streaked, as pale as death, who performs a kind of dance of death. There are no words spoken, no explanation for who these people are and what their cult-like rituals represent. The story is all the more ominous for its opacity. The winged creature and the miners seem to be proxies for a more dreadful, unseen, force. It is a gnomic work but full of visceral dread. The building looks neutral and unremarkable once you are outside it again but the threat stays with you as you board the boat back to the mainland, to light and safety. Until 15 June as part of the Biennale Teatro 2025. Arifa Akbar's trip was provided by Venice Biennale
Daily Mail
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Tragic fate of 'the world's most beautiful boy': Actor now looks VERY different after cult 70s film that turned him into a sex symbol at 15 ruined his life and plunged him into alcoholism
When he was only 15, Bjorn Andrésen was declared the 'most beautiful boy in the world' after Luchino Visconti cast the unassuming Swedish teen as Tadzio in Death in Venice. The embodiment of 'pure beauty', Bjorn was handpicked by the Italian filmmaker to play the sailor-suited adolescent opposite Dirk Bogarde in one of the world's most famous queer films. His turn as Tadzio, whose youthful, boyish looks drove Bogarde's character - an ailing, ageing composer - to temptation, catapulted Bjorn to stardom and gained him international recognition. The Italian auteur's film also 'f***ed up a lot of things' for Bjorn, whose blond-locked, almost unearthly beauty earned him comparisons to Michelagenelo's David when he was still a child. Bjorn, now in his seventies, condemned Visconti, who died in 1976, as a 'cultural predator' who allegedly exploited his looks and sexualised him to promote the movie -before throwing him to the wolves. The moniker became a millstone around Bjorn's neck, as the actor admitted Death in Venice remained the unmoving grey cloud that totally eclipsed his life. Five decades after Visconti hailed his Tadzio as the world's most beautiful boy, Bjorn was relegated to life of relative obscurity - marked also by a profound personal sadness and mental health struggles. In 2021, it was reported that Bjorn was living alone in a squalid flat, chain smoking and bickering with his long-suffering, on-off girlfriend and getting into trouble with his landlord for leaving his gas stove on. He also looked world's away from the fresh-faced teenager that inspired a generation of manga artists and became one of Japan's first Western idols, with Bjorn now sporting a perpetually nicotine-stained beard and long, flowing white hair. Born in Stockholm, Sweden, Bjorn was 10 when his mother, Barbro, died by suicide before he was sent to live with his maternal grandparents. His bohemian mother had never told him the identity of his father and, before her death, made no secret that she wanted more from life than being mother to Björn and his half-sister. Growing up, Bjorn had no interest in acting and wanted, instead, to be a musician but his grandmother continued to send him to auditions in the hope that at least one of her grandchildren would become famous. That was how Bjorn found himself standing before Visconti, whose search for Tadzio's 'pure beauty' had taken him across Europe - but to no avail. A documentary about Bjorn's life - titled 'The Most Beautiful Boy in the World' - includes black-and-white footage of his audition for Death in Venice in a room full of young boys and casting directors. 'How old is he? Older right?' Visconti asks a Swedish-speaking casting director as Andrésen poses self-consciously for them at a casting call in Stockholm one chilly day in February 1970. 'Yes, a little. He's fifteen,' the casting director replies. 'Fifteen? Very beautiful,' Visconti observes. 'Could you ask him to undress?' Bjorn, visibly taken aback, eventually strips down to his trunks, as a photographer snaps away and a delighted Visconti makes clear he has found exactly what he was looking for. Looking back on his audition, Bjorn told Vanity Fair, Visconti 'sexualised me' and admitted he 'wasn't comfortable' taking his clothes off. 'When they asked me to take off my shirt, I wasn't comfortable,' he said. 'I wasn't prepared for that. 'I remember when he posed me with one foot against the wall, I would never stand like that. When I watch it now, I see how that son of a b**** sexualised me.' The 15-year-old was signed to the film and paid $4,000 for his role in Death in Venice - one that, he had no idea, would define him for the rest of his life. Filming was an incredibly isolating experience, as Visconti reportedly instructed the crew to stay away from Bjorn. In his 1983 memoir, Bogarde, who played the musician enamoured by the young Polish boy in Death in Venice, described the strict rules Visconti imposed on Bjorn to preserve his beauty. He was, Bogarde said, 'never allowed to go into the sun, kick a football with his companions, swim in the polluted sea, or do anything which might have given him the smallest degree of pleasure'. Bjorn 'suffered it all splendidly,' the late British actor revealed. The reason for Visconti's unyielding rules would later be revealed as he unveiled Bjorn as 'the most beautiful boy in the world' at the London premiere of Death in Venice that was attended by Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Anne. A marketing ploy, the remark piqued such interest in Bjorn that he was turned into an overnight celebrity with the world's most fawned-over face. 'It felt like swarms of bats around me. It was a living nightmare,' Andrésen previously of the fame and attention for which he was woefully underprepared. 'I was a sex object - Big Game.' The 2021 documentary about Bjorn's life, which charts his rise to fame and its life-altering consequences, raised unsettling questions about the ethics of a production that has become a cult gay film. Bogarde was openly homosexual as was Visconti, who said his male lovers included Italian director Franco Zeffirelli and Umberto II, the last King of Italy. He was 63 when he made Death In Venice (based on a novella by German writer Thomas Mann, also gay) with a mostly gay crew, too. But Bjorn wasn't gay — and even if he had been, he had only just turned 15 when he auditioned. Far too young to be turned into a sex object whom Visconti took to gay nightclubs and who later became a trophy for rich Paris men who lavished him with presents and meals so they could parade him around. After Death in Venice premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, Visconti and his friends reportedly took Bjorn to a gay nightclub where he felt the waiters and guests leered at him. 'It was extremely uncomfortable,' he described the outing. 'I think [Visconti] was testing me to see if I was gay.' He recalled drinking himself in a stupor 'just to shut it out' but it was too late to turn a blind eye to his newfound status as a sex symbol and - for some - a gay icon. After Death in Venice, the then-young actor was inundated with sackfuls of fan mail from besotted teenagers and grown men alike According to Yokogaomag, Death in Venice sparked an intense wave of Bjorn fandom in Japan that eventually made him one of the country's first Western idols. When Bjorn visited the country to promote the film, before Death in Venice was released across Japan in October 1971, he was met with screaming female fans in scenes comparable to Beatlemania and, in fact, recorded a couple of songs. Hailed as the 'pinnacle of beauty' in Japan, Bjorn's delicate features captured the imagination of legendary manga artists, including Riyoko Ikeda who modelled the character of Lady Oscar in her series 'The Rose of Versailles' on his likeness. Back in Europe, he continued acting but struggled to shake off his 'world's most beautiful boy' moniker. In 1976, he came to Paris for a film. It never came to anything but he stayed a year despite being penniless. His lifestyle was funded by a string of rich men who showered him with expensive meals, gave him a 500-franc weekly allowance and even provided him with a flat, the 2021 documentary revealed, as Bjorn admitted he was 'bloody naive' about their intentions towards him. 'I must have been bloody naive because it was sort of like: 'Wow! Everyone's so nice,' ' he reflected. 'I don't think they treated me out of the kindness of their heart ... I felt like [a] wandering trophy.' While the documentary doesn't explore Bjorn's own sexuality, he previously told The Daily Mail he felt a fleeting confusion about his sexuality in his 20s and had one homosexual experience. 'I did it more or less to be able to say I'd tried it but it's not really my cup of tea. It wasn't more serious than that,' he said at the time. Bjorn has maintained he's always been attracted to women, but struggled to form relationships with them as he grew older. After growing used to clicking his fingers and having girls come running, he admits he never learnt how to flirt. Even so, he married a poet named Suzanna Roman after they had a daughter, Robine, in 1984. However, tragedy again struck three years later when their nine-month-old son Elvin, died. Bjorn had been lying in bed beside him, insensible after a night out drinking, while his wife took their daughter to kindergarten. Bjorn fell into a deep depression after Elvin's death as he blamed himself for being an inadequate father. 'Their diagnosis is sudden infant death syndrome but my diagnosis is lack of love,' he said in the documentary. 'I descended into depression, alcohol, self-destruction in all ways imaginable - it was an ego trip. Poor me, me, me.' He disappeared from public view so completely that some thought he was dead until he re-emerged in 2003, when a photo of him was used to illustrate the front cover of The Beautiful Boy, Germaine Greer's ode to the beauty of young boys. Bjorn publicly complained he'd never given permission and said, having been exposed to it, adult lust - by men or women - for adolescents was nothing to celebrate. According to the documentary, Bjorn still suffered from depression at the time as its makers, Kristina Lindström and Kristian Petri, caught up with the man who was once the world's most beautiful boy. Reflecting on that fateful day that forever altered the course of his life, and Visconti's role in shaping it, the greying Bjorn said: 'Life and career-wise, it f***ed up a lot of things'.
