The monumental descent into hell of an aesthete. There is no other way to define Ludwig, the third and final gem of Luchino Visconti’s “German Trilogy,” a work that stands as a baroque mausoleum, a sepulchre of velvet and gold erected not so much to the memory of a king, but to an idea of beauty so sublime it becomes self-destructive. If The Damned was a Wagnerian orgy of power that danced on the ruins of Nazism and Death in Venice a feverish elegy on physical and artistic decadence, Ludwig is the exhausting and magnificent requiem for the last romantic, a man who attempted to transform his own kingdom into a total work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk), only to be devoured by it.

Visconti does not make a biopic in the conventional sense of the term. His cinema, here more than ever, is an act of almost archaeological contemplation. As Stanley Kubrick would do a few years later with his Barry Lyndon, Visconti pursues a truth that is not so much factual as atmospheric, a sensory immersion in an era at its twilight. The flickering candlelight on the brocades, the oppressive weight of the furnishings, the dilated silences in the immense halls of the Bavarian castles: every frame is dense, saturated with a sumptuous melancholy. Armando Nannuzzi's camera moves with a hieratic, almost liturgical slowness, compelling the viewer to enter not into History, but into the state of mind of its protagonist. No epic battle or political intrigue holds sway here; the true drama unfolds in the interstices, in the glances, in the progressive capitulation of a soul before a world—the Prussian, Bismarckian, industrial world—that no longer understands the language of grace and fantasy.

At the centre of this disintegrating universe, Helmut Berger delivers one of the most all-consuming and symbiotic performances in the history of cinema. His Ludwig is not played; he is embodied. Visconti, his mentor and Pygmalion, sculpts him as his definitive creation, tracing with an almost sadistic precision the character's downward spiral. From the ephebic and almost virginal beauty of the coronation, his eyes alight with a feverish idealism, to the physical decay of his final years—the ruined teeth, the body grown heavy, the gaze lost in delirium—Berger offers himself up as a sacrificial icon. It is a journey that recalls, in its ruthless consistency, that of Wilde’s Dorian Gray, but where the portrait that ages and corrupts is the body itself, a mirror to a soul eroded by the sublime.

The pulsating heart of the film is the relationship between Ludwig and Richard Wagner. This is not simple patronage, but a fetishistic obsession, a transfusion of life and finances from the king to the artist in the name of an absolute aesthetic ideal. Ludwig does not simply want to finance Wagner’s work; he wants to inhabit it. His castles—Neuschwanstein, Linderhof, Herrenchiemsee—are not royal residences but permanent stage sets, lithic symptoms of an aesthetic psychosis. They are petrified dreams, built to escape the vulgarity of the real. In this, Ludwig is a spiritual brother to Des Esseintes, the protagonist of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À rebours, the archetype of the decadent who retreats from the world to create an artificial and hyper-refined universe. Like Des Esseintes, Ludwig seeks salvation in artifice, in theatre, in music, attempting to sublimate a desire—homoerotic, but more broadly, a desire for spiritual communion—that reality denies him. Wagner (a superb Trevor Howard) is at once the high priest of this cult and its most rapacious parasite, a selfish genius who understands and exploits the almost religious devotion of his patron.

Alongside Wagner, the other mirror figure is Empress Elisabeth of Austria, “Sissi.” And here Visconti pulls off a metacinematic manoeuvre of rare intelligence. By casting Romy Schneider, the actress forever linked to the saccharine and popular image of Sissi from the 1950s films, the director creates a poignant short circuit. Visconti’s Schneider is a disenchanted, neurotic woman, trapped within her own icon, just as Ludwig is a prisoner of his role. Their dialogues are conversations between two impossibly elegant ghosts, two kindred spirits in their inability to adapt to the world, who recognize in each other a shared condemnation to beauty and solitude. It is as if Visconti is forcing the myth to look at itself in the mirror and see the wrinkles, the sadness, the truth behind the fairytale. It is one of the most powerful deconstructions of a pop icon that cinema has ever dared to attempt.

Shot in 1972, in a Europe still reeling from the utopias and disillusions of ’68, Ludwig is a film profoundly out of its time, and for that very reason, prophetic. It is a work that reflects on the end of aristocracies (a theme dear to Visconti, the “Red Count”) and on the brutality with which raison d'état and the economy crush individuality and the dream. The long, almost trial-like final section, in which the king is deposed through cold, bureaucratic medical reports, is an indictment against a normality that pathologizes difference, against a pragmatism that lobotomizes the imagination. The film’s own troubled production history—mutilated by its producers upon release and only restored years later according to the director’s wishes—seems almost to echo Ludwig’s own fate: a majestic and “inconvenient” work of art, misunderstood and hacked to pieces by commercial logic.

Ludwig is not an easy film. Its exhausting running time (in the full version), its funereal pace, and its visual magniloquence can be off-putting. But it is an immersive experience, a hypnosis that, if submitted to, reveals an abyssal depth. It is a powerful meditation on the nature of art as both refuge and prison, on power as a mask that suffocates identity, and on beauty as the most wonderful and terrible of condemnations. The final image of the king’s body floating in the waters of Lake Starnberg, alongside that of his doctor, is not just the end of a life, but the eclipse of a world. A world in which a king could still believe, madly, that a Wagnerian aria or the construction of a fairytale castle was more important and more real than a peace treaty or a state budget. It is the defeat of the swan, and Visconti sings its elegy with a funerary and unforgettable grace.