If The Most Beautiful Boy In The World were a punctuation mark, it would be an ellipsis. Documentarians Kristina Lindström and Kristian Petri have made a film, a portrait of Death In Venice actor Björn Andrésen, that specialises in insinuation, using plaintive music and dramatic slow-mo to underscore testimonies that tail off atmospherically.
The subject — the neglect of a vulnerable child actor who 50 years later is struggling with the basics of life — is so stirring that the temptation is to give the film a pass on the basis that it has given a storytelling platform to Andrésen, now 66 and living in Stockholm. Yet the filmmaking techniques are distractingly heavy-handed and — worryingly — there has been no attempt to reassure audiences that, in the making of this film, history has not repeated itself in terms of the care afforded to its mentally fragile subject.
The overall portrait is a muddied one.
Two vignettes from the film’s two timelines form its opening: a casting session over 50 years ago as Luchino Visconti asks a clearly uncomfortable teenage Andrésen to strip down to his underpants, and Andrésen today, emaciated, with a long, white beard, living in a filthy apartment, under threat of eviction. The contemporary sections feel both intrusive and contrived, as the camera follows Andrésen and his girlfriend as they talk about what happened to him five decades ago, flicking through old newspaper cuttings.
The strongest sections are archival: Super 8 footage from the set of Death In Venice and of Andrésen at home with his sister and the granny who pushed him into the limelight; press-conference footage of Visconti at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival saying, “He has aged now — you can see he’s at an awkward age,” to a roomful of journalists who laugh as Andrésen sits there, uncomprehending.
Lindström and Petri dwell on the objectification that followed Andrésen’s fame: the photo shoots, fandom in Japan and brief music career, creating a queasy feeling as the deification of his youthful beauty — something the film criticises — is replicated in a voyeuristic barrage of images at the same time as his narration tells of unhappiness and loneliness. Relationships with older men are alluded to in unfinished detail. Tragedies that beset his personal life are rattled off. The overall portrait is a muddied one, yet the parts in focus form a powerful j’accuse: a finger pointed at an industry, and society, that values star power over wellbeing.