There’s shooting on water — one of the most daunting challenges a director can face — and then there’s shooting in Venice, which is shooting on water plus shooting in an ancient, expensive, Byzantine-style tourist trap that’s sinking. Yet the flux and insecurity associated with the city — it has weathered pit stops by Attila the Hun, Charlemagne and Napoleon as well as the Black Death and coach parties — have exerted a powerful grip on the imagination of film-makers. Movies have entered its maze-like streets and canals, darkness and fog, seeking something elusive.
That something has often been love. Venice is, after all, where Casanova forged his reputation. It’s where Shelley was captivated by the city’s beauty. It’s where, er, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas met. It’s also where, in David Lean’s Summertime, Katharine Hepburn’s spinster secretary from Ohio slips into an affair with a married man (Rossano Brazzi) because she knows that it’s all that she will have.
Jack Hildyard’s colour cinematography turned the city into a ravishing setting that established Venice as a reliably photogenic supporting player. There’s no other reason for Roger Moore’s 007 in Moonraker, Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Bruce Willis and Michelle Pfeiffer in the marital drama The Story of Us to pass through except that the city looks great.
Like Paris and Rome, Venice has also become Hollywood visual shorthand for cultural sophistication as well as romance. That’s why Woody Allen runs through labyrinthine streets pursuing the Tintoretto scholar Julia Roberts in his quixotic musical Everyone Says I Love You. It’s also an evocative place for intrigue. As Lasse Hallström’s Casanova suggests, the great seducer (Heath Ledger) may not have been so much an individual as a fluid identity to be passed on like a mask to the next virile candidate. It’s also where Matt Damon’s murderous identity thief ends up in The Talented Mr Ripley.
Yet Venice has also been seen as a place of death as well as reinvention, its faded decadence conjuring up an air of decay. Its most famous victim is Gustav von Aschenbach, the dying protagonist of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and Visconti’s film with Dirk Bogarde. The adolescent boy Tadzio, the object of von Aschenbach’s desire, is first sighted in the Hotel des Bains on the Lido, the home of the city’s annual film festival. Visconti replaces the traditional vision of golden palaces and sunlit canals with a city buried in fog and humidity. In this swaying liquid world the gondolas become funereal black silhouettes floating on murky waters.
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Like Joseph Losey before him with Eva, in which Stanley Baker’s novelist is ensnared by Jeanne Moreau, Nicolas Roeg shot out of season to bring a wintry sheen to Don’t Look Now. Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie play the parents of a drowned child who encounter, in the city’s dankly crumbling splendour, presentiments of her existence beyond the grave. Venice comes across as the sinister skeleton of a once-great community, crumbling and plagued by a serial killer.
The suspicion towards Venice as somewhere so beautiful that it is too good to be true continues with Paul Schrader’s The Comfort of Strangers, adapted from Ian McEwan’s novel by Harold Pinter. Rupert Everett and Natasha Richardson arrive to salvage their relationship, but become the object of the dangerous games of a sadomasochistic Venetian couple.
At least The Wings of the Dove, Iain Softley’s version of the Henry James novel, suggests why people like visiting Venice. The film is full of masked bacchanals and frantic couplings. But then you see the ailing American heiress Milly (Alison Elliott) in a pale dress sitting on a pale chaise longue, and it becomes clear that death is again not so far away.
Film-makers continue to be drawn to Venice and the city authorities are eager to accommodate more productions. When Michael Radford shot The Merchant of Venice in the city, the Rialto Bridge was closed for the first time as well as the Grand Canal at intervals for a day. Like the city’s film festival, Venice has always been about adaptability and survival.
Gondolier’s guide to film locations
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CAFFÈ FLORIAN
The city’s best known coffee house, located in St Mark’s Square, is where Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow) confronts Tom Ripley (Matt Damon) about her suspicions in The Talented Mr Ripley.
HOTEL DES BAINS
Dirk Bogarde fatally falls for the beautiful Polish boy in Visconti’s Death in Venice while both are staying at the hotel on the Lido. He expires in a deckchair on its private section of beach.
SCUOLA DI SAN ROCCO
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Woody Allen and Julia Roberts first meet surrounded by massive Tintoretto canvases in Allen’s musical romance Everyone Says I Love You.
SAN NICCOLÒ DEI MENDICOLI
Donald Sutherland almost comes a cropper on the scaffolding erected to restore the church’s interior in Don’t Look Now. It’s tucked away in the south-west of the city.
THE GRAND CANAL
Many films have been shot along the canal, including Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove and Summertime, in which Katharine Hepburn falls in (and later blamed for an eye infection, even though she often swam in the canal at dusk after shooting).