MOVIE REVIEW : Mad About the Boy: ‘Beethoven’s Nephew’

In his compassionate but sly “Beethoven’s Nephew” (Beverly Center Cineplex), Paul Morrissey combines the camp pathos and humor of his Warhol films with a formality and elegance that is new in his work.

Morrissey is the ideal film maker to delve into the saga of the great composer’s all-consuming jealous love for his nephew. Imagine what heavy going it could be if told in the dull traditional lives-of-the-great-composers manner--or perhaps worse, in the fevered, hyperbolic Ken Russell style.

“(Beethoven’s) talent amazed me,” remarked Goethe in 1812. “Unfortunately, he is an utterly untamed personality, perhaps not at all in the wrong, if he finds the world so detestable--but he thereby does not make it more enjoyable for himself--or others.”

Goethe’s understated appraisal of the man is milder than most but may count for more, since it reveals the understanding of one genius for another.

Actor Wolfgang Reichmann’s heroically scaled Beethoven is a bombastic, ungainly figure who makes life miserable for most everyone who comes into contact with him, especially his nephew Karl.

But it was Karl for whom the composer waged a protracted and ugly custody battle with his sister-in-law Johanna (Jane Birkin), whom he labeled, as he did most women, a “detestable whore.” From the age of 9, poor Karl was in his uncle’s thrall and very nearly never out of his sight. When this crude, utterly uninhibited and desperately lonely man says that he loves the youth more than his music, we believe him. However, love of such an overpoweringly obsessive, sexually ambiguous nature may truly be mad; what is amazing is how resilient Karl is in not being destroyed by it.

The mixing of seasoned, stylish professional actors with the inexperienced usually spells disaster, but Morrissey (who wrote his script with actor Mathieu Carriere, cast as the Archduke Rodolphe) makes it the crux of his strategy.

He contrasts Reichmann’s marvelously larger-than-life, very Klaus Maria Brandauer performance with Dietmar Prinz’s flat, sullen readings as the monosyllabic Karl, who might be handsome if he weren’t so petulant. At the same time, Birkin’s gentle wronged woman is played off her near-mute young lover (Walter Schupfer), who looks like a GQ model. That Prinz and Schupfer have the manner of the cynical male hustlers in Morrissey’s earlier films points up the tragicomic absurdity of both Beethoven’s and Johanna’s romanticism and brings the film down to earth--even as Beethoven’s music, expressing his profound love for Karl, soars on the sound track. (Worth noting is Nathalie Baye’s delicious cameo as a worldly actress who seduces Karl.) “Beethoven’s Nephew” (rated R for sex and nudity) is a brisk, witty commentary on the often wildly contradictory relationship between life and art.

‘BEETHOVEN’S NEPHEW’

A New World release of an Orfilm production in association with Almaro-C.B.L. Producer Marita Coustet. Director Paul Morrissey. Screenplay Mathieu Carriere, Morrissey; from a novel by Luigi Magnani. Camera Hanus Polak. Music Ludwig van Beethoven. Art director Mario Garbuglia. Costumes Claudia Bobsin. Film editors Albert Jurgenson, Michele Lauliac. With Wolfgang Reichmann, Dietmar Prinz, Jane Birkin, Mathieu Carriere, Nathalie Baye, Walter Schupfer, Elena Rostropovitch.

Running time: 1 hour, 43 minutes.

MPAA-rated: R (under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian).