Anonymous Venetian

The odd thing is that there are so few movies about musicians dying of incurable diseases in Venice. It is a natural subject, and Venice is the world’s most decorative city for dying in if you have a little notice. It is also the world’s most beautiful city, I think, and so a movie shot on location there can hardly help but delight the eye.

“The Anonymous Venetian” does that well enough, and I stayed until the end because I liked the scenery. But the story is one of those indigestible tragedies where the people on the screen seem to be crying more than we think they have a right to. The musician (Tony Musante) is dying, and his ex-wife (Florinda Bolkan) comes to spend a day with him.

After she learns about his illness, she decides to postpone her departure and take the 9:30 express instead of the 6:15 local. That isn’t exactly an earth-shaking emotional decision, but it will have to do. The movie has been dubbed into English so badly that only broad melodramatic strokes survive the dialog. At one point, for example, after her long statement of regret, all he says is “Edifying!”

But their conversation takes place all over Venice; there are many locations you won’t recognize unless you know Venice quite well indeed. Most Venetian scenes are shot in St. Mark’s Square with maybe a walk across the Rialto thrown in for good measure. “The Anonymous Venetian,” however, lets its characters prowl through passageways in isolated residential quarters of the city; there are lots of cats and stones dripping with moss and arches leading into gloom and then out again to cross bridges.

Better still, it was shot out of season probably late October or November when the kind of tourists who find it fashionable to detest Venice usually stop over on their way to Florence (that stuffy warren of traffic jams) in the middle of July. They find the city crowded and the canals smelly, but you cannot expect a city of 250,000 inhabitants to absorb a million tourists a year without crowding them just a little in July, now, can you?

But the city out of season is something else. I saw it first during a rainy and cold December, and I have loved it ever since. It is the last human-sized city on earth, built for people at their best or second-best or sometimes even their worst; a city poised in that exquisite tension between reality and romance; a city designed to be seen from the water which means that however much you may wish her well as she sinks into the lagoon or lifts from it again on her marble foundations, you will always know her as she was meant to be known from beside one bridge or another.

“The Anonymous Venetian” does a good quiet job of sinking into Venice and giving us some real places. But why do I go on about Venice like this? Because the story is worthless, that’s why completely worthless and so what we have to do is block out the dialog titles and keep looking over our shoulder at those characters standing by that canal.

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