The Most Beautiful Boy in the World (2021) review

While doing casting for his next film, an adaptation of Thomas Mann's novella Death in Venice, Italian filmmaker Luchino Visconti flew all over Europe looking at young boys and teenagers before deciding on 15-year-old Swede Björn Andrésen to play the character Tadzio; now in his mid-60's, documentarians Lindström and Petri catch up with him living in a grimy apartment in Stockholm as he talks about how his life went downhill following that experience.  The collection of tragedies that befell him is long and very sad - he never knew his biological father, his mother committed suicide, he lost a son to SIDS - but the truth is there are a lot of individuals who have faced similar hardships; Andrésen and the directors keep wanting to place a huge portion of the blame on Visconti, but after fifty years you have to just let some things go.  It's needlessly drawn out and turned into grief porn (slow motion gets thoroughly abused) - the image of him in the sailor suit walking around the Lido may have immortalized him in the history of cinema (and the nation of Japan), but no one said time on Earth was a stroll through the daisies.