Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #19679 in DVD
• Released on: 2005-03-28
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Classical, PAL
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 111 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
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, dream-like experience. --Tom Keogh

Synopsis
Provides an insight into the life of Gustav Mahler. Aboard a train, Mahler and his wife look back on their lives and expose the reasons behind their failing marriage.

Customer Reviews

Inspired work of genius
I am a great fan of Ken Russell's work and this film must rank as one of his best! It is not a biopic in the traditional sense (if you are looking for something like that,it is probably better if you don't watch it!) , but a fascinating cinematic pastiche infused throughout with grotesque dance routines, recurring Wagnerian leitmotifs and a constantly evolving (if tongue-in-cheek) Freudian subtext. If you like your cinema over the top, then this film will thrill you.

A Fantasy Film On The Life Of Gustav Mahler
Although Ken Russell was known as an admirer of the music of Gustav Mahler, I wasnt quite sure what he was trying to achieve here. Mahler's life was extremely complex, especially during his formative years as a composer and conductor in Vienna and in New York where he established himself as one of the all time great conductors despite many enemies and jealous rivals. Although he did have many admirers such as Bruno Walter and Erich Wolfgang Korngold. However, none of this is explored in the film. What the film does explore is his complex marriage to the beautiful Alma who bore him two daughters, one of whom died very young.

Alma who was much younger than Gustav when they married was a complex woman in her own right. They are often seen at loggerheads over his musical style which irritated her through her lack of understanding what Mahler was hoping to achieve and that was to bring a new style of music to the 20thC. The film takes place on a train journey with Mahler, now nearing to the end of his short life, (he was only 50 when he died of a throat infection which weakened his heart)is looking back on his career as a composer and conductor. Moreover, the relationship between him and his wife Alma is strained by Mahler's knowledge of her numerous affairs which are highlighted during certain scenes in the film. Indeed, the marriage only survived due to Mahler's intense love for her. However, his anguish at knowing of Alma's infidelity is highlighted by his later compositions especially with the unfinished Tenth Symphony which is one of his most advanced works and also one of his most emotionally profound.

Highlights of his music are played consistantly throughout the film with great effect and do enhance the drama and the numerous fantasy scenes especially with the absurd Cemetery scenes, and the scenes with the so called Valkirie on the mountain top with flames belching from a nearby cave. (Shades of Wagner's Siegfried.)

Take the film for what it is, a fantasy of one of the greatest composers who ever lived, and whose music is much admired throughout the world today. Maybe one day, some one just might make a real film of Mahler's extraordinary life, and until that happens, we will have to accept this film for what it is. Entertaining though which can be safely said, silly in parts, moving in others. Robert Powell is rather good as Mahler, although Georgina Hale is absolutely nothing like Alma. It is one of the films which you might either like, or detest.

The music used throughout the film is conducted by Bernard Haitink one of the greatest conductors of Mahler's music during the last thirty six years.

Dreamy and rock video account of Mahler from Ken Russell
From the stunning opening sequence, where Mahler's wooden composing hut explodes into flame to the first movement of the Tenth Symphony, we are plunged into mythical, personal and ironic territory. Very much the stuff of Mahler's music - he told Sibelius that the symphony should encompass the world.

Immediately, we switch to the beginning of the Third symphony, accompanying a chrysalis like creature struggling for life on a barren coast, like an exotic dancer or erotic mummy (the gorgeous Georgina Hale who also plays the composer's wife). This sets the tone of the movie - where the dreamlike world of the unconscious meets the everyday, counterpointed by Mahler's astonishing musical and philosophic vision.

We then move to a train station, Alma shuffling out to get a fashion magazine whilst Mahler gazes out of the window. An amusing parody of Visconti's Death in Venice ensues, the Gustav von Achenbach (Dirk Bogarde/Mahler) figure clad in white, hands folded in his lap, watching with no little interest as the golden haired Tadzio figure almost lap dances around him to the Adagietto of the Fifth symphony. Mahler himself smiles at the tableaux - post modernist irony, a new take on another director, a sly dig or all of these and more?

Two other sequences stand out - Mahler confronting Alma with Max's love letters to the Fifth symphony within an avenue of autumnal trees, and Mahler's on-off relationship with what would appear to be the Angel of Death, a busty soprano much despised by Alma, who is irritated by her husband's lack of interest in her own compositions. This is very much a film about the creative tension between lovers, as well as anti-Semitism, the compromises we make to get on in the world, and the consequences of those decisions.

It's a real shame that none of the sequences take place in New York, where Mahler conducted at the Metropolitan Opera towards the end of his life. The Fifth movement of the (unfinished but often reconstructed) Tenth Symphony starts with several heart-stopping drum beats, inspired by the funeral cortege of a heroic fireman that Mahler witnessed from the top storey of a skyscraper. This has superb cinematic possibilities. Then again, we should feel lucky for what we've already got in terms of arresting visual sequences in this movie.

Russell has the measure of the lyricism, irony and philosophy implicit within Mahler's music. This works nicely with the young Mahler alone in the forest, becoming aware of the unity of creation and of the fecundity of nature and thus of musical inspiration. This is accompanied by the pantheistic Third Symphony - the section with the white horse is unforgettable and has a mythic feeling unmatched in many films.

Of course, certain bits don't quite work and sections of the movie drag - the East End type Jewish family sequences are dull and stereotypical, and possibly quite offensive by now. Some might find the Cosima Wagner skit offensive, choreographed to a mixture of the Ninth Symphony and Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries (I thought it hilarious, and the steel-helmeted, leather-clad whip wielding dominatrix Cosima writhing on the red leather cross is very sex-and-death, with a real sting in the tail).

Others may feel that the director goes too far with the funeral sequence, where Moulin-Rouge outfitted Alma can-cans on Mahler's coffin before he is cremated by four black-clad Nazis, one of which is Alma's lover Max, counterpointed by the Seventh and Ninth symphonies. Premonition or twenty-twenty hindsight?

Incidentally, look at the marble bust of Beethoven in the cemetery at the beginning of this sequence - don't you think he looks like Alex (Malcolm McDowell) in Clockwork Orange? Is Russell having a sly dig at Kubrick?

Anyway, an excellent movie. If you love Mahler, you'll find this challenging and provocative. Georgina Hale is the most sublimely beautiful composer's wife on film and Robert Powell is a knockout as the tortured, self-obsessed, sarcastic and ultimately tragic composer - he even looks like Mahler.

Fantastic! Play it L-O-U-D too (shame Russell didn't use the fabulous Bernstein recordings with the NYPO - an orchestra with a superb Mahler tradition - from the sixties for the soundtrack BTW as the Haitink recordings used for the soundtrack are a bit dull, but they work well enough in context).