The Most Beautiful Boy in the World – Världens vackraste pojke (2021)

Directed by: Kristina Lindstrom, Kristian Petri | 94 minutes | documentary | Starring: Björn Andrésen, Luchino Visconti, Kristina Lindström, Mario Tursi, Dagny Erixon, Jessica Vennberg, Jessica Vennberg, Margareta Krantz, Miriam Sambol, Ann Lagerström

Anyone who has seen the American-Swedish horror film ‘Midsommar’ (2019) will probably remember the shocking scene with the elderly couple, who set in motion the rest of the atrocities in the deceptively lovely-looking commune. The actor who plays the older man is Björn Andrésen. That name may not immediately mean something to you, but in his youth he was a big star in Europe and Japan for a number of years. Andrésen was only fifteen years old when he was cast by the great Italian film-maker Luchino Visconti as Tadzio in ‘Death in Venice’ (1971), based on Thomas Mann’s novel of the same name. Tadzio is an angelic boy who becomes a real obsession for the much older composer Gustav von Aschenbach, played by Dirk Bogarde. A pure beauty, modeled after the Greek gods. At the film’s premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, Visconti labeled Andrésen ‘The Most Beautiful Boy in the World’, a designation that created high expectations that the growing Swedish teenager could never live up to.

Opinions are divided about Visconti’s film, but one thing is certain: fifteen-year-old Andrésen was perfect for the role. He was exactly as the filmmaker had envisioned: young, androgynous, pale, with angelic blond hair and a dreamy look. It didn’t even matter if he could act. Visconti had searched town and country to find his perfect Tadzio, we see at the beginning of the documentary ‘The Most Beautiful Boy in the World’ (2021) by Kristina Lindström and Kristian Petri on the basis of rich archive material. An improvised screen test in Stockholm in 1970 shows how popular the role in a film by the great Visconti is, because hundreds of hopeful boys – some still very young – are eager to show themselves to him. Björn was fifth or sixth and Visconti knew immediately. This boy didn’t need any styling, because why would you continue to work on perfection? Björn was a shy boy from the county who never knew his father and had a difficult relationship with his mother who eventually left him when the boy was only eleven years old; a few years later she was found dead in the woods. Björn grew up with his grandparents in Stockholm but was damaged by the events for the rest of his life.

The documentary continues to explore the stardom Andrésen achieved, but also shows us the man he is today. Lindström and Petri created a modest but sincere and intimate portrait in which beauty (and its transience), stardom, but also exploitation and loss are central. Andrésen is now in his sixties and with his grubby and long gray beard and wrinkled face, he hardly resembles the boy he was then; you have to look very closely to find a glimpse of that enigmatic young angel of yore. When we look into his eyes we see resignation and loneliness, but also an emptiness. The experiences after ‘Death in Venice’ have visibly eroded him. By the age of fifteen, Andrésen had already become a sex object for Visconti’s largely gay crew, though he had given his people strict orders to keep away from the boy on set. According to Andrésen, the filmmaker himself also limited his interaction with his pupil to four assignments: ‘Go! Stop! Turn around! And smile!’. Months later, at the Cannes Film Festival, Visconti’s young star was in full swing, though he viciously joked at a press conference that Andrésen was prettier during the auditions and that, now that he’s sixteen, he’s too old and too young. gets long.

To Andrésen it felt like a swarm of bats hung around him. Would he also mean Visconti himself? Being watched all the time, as if you’re being preyed on, must have felt incredibly oppressive and uncomfortable for a sixteen-year-old boy. After the premiere, the director took him to a gay bar, where Andrésen felt like he was being assaulted by all those stares. Later, he would spend a year in Paris as some sort of well-paid escort for rich, lusty gay men. He was also a star for a while in Japan, where he was a teen pop idol and even inspired the androgynous “bishounen” characters in manga comics. The documentary touches on all these sides of Andrésen, but also shows how he is doing now. He is a talented musician and, as mentioned, still acts, but lives in a basic apartment that he clutters up with junk. Lindström and Petri gradually show us the man behind ‘The Most Beautiful Boy in the World’, and show us what has marked him. On a personal level, in addition to the lack of loving parents, there is also the tragic loss of one of his own children that left deep marks and which also impresses us viewers.

Beauty has often been linked to tragedy and this documentary proves that there really is no difference between men and women in how they experience that sudden fame for their appearance. In the case of Björn Andrésen, the young version seems, both literally and figuratively, to be a different person in a different time and universe. The fact that instant stardom can make a (young) individual grow and shape as well as pop the bud was rarely so close.