It's quicker to read the novella than watch the film, mind. Von Aschenbach spends a lot of time meditating on the nature and meaning of beauty. That's because he is an intellectual and World War One hasn't happened yet.

Nowadays, Mann could just come straight out with it and say von Aschenbach wants massive grunting bottom-sex with this saucy young chicken from the land of the big kielbasa. They'd oil up and trug one another stupid, pausing only to invite some strapping gondoliers to stick their oars in. Though of course the two principals would have to be about the same age: a flick involving physical romance between an elderly academic and a boy who's probably underage in 93% of the world's jurisdictions would be box-office poison.

But in the actual story, though, there's no sex. Just a lot of meditating and a cholera epidemic.

So here we are, lovely sunny day, and instead of beautiful youngsters there's a small line-out of overweight blokes in their 30s and 40s. Long shorts, bellies hanging over the waistband, England shirts...

We stand along the tideline, all keeping an eye on our respective offspring frolicking in the waves, all of us adults too wussy to actually go into that bloody freezing water. (No, really, I'd best not. I might give the Atlantic Ocean athlete's foot.)

There's something in the novella where it says that beauty is the only virtue that is visible. Some paraphrase of Plato's 'Phaedrus'. Bollocks, of course.

Now watch this...

... Into the middle of the scene walks a slender woman in a bikini. She has bottled blonde hair and quite remarkable skin. This is a European woman who's been turned the texture and colour of walnuts by the tanning bed. She's probably in her 30s but it's hard to tell.

Don't look at her - watch the men. The leching reflex in the mature heterosexual male is extremely sophisticated; the shapes given off by a woman in a bikini arrive in the brain nanoseconds before she even appears in peripheral vision. So all the blokes turn, look... and then turn away again.

And your point, Signor Professore? That here is someone whose pursuit of an impossible ideal of beauty (originating with the same damn Greeks who sanctify Von Ashenbach's desires) has ended up less physically attractive than she would have been had she done nothing. (Assuming she wanted to be attractive to men, anyhow...)

And now, an extract from an email that arrrived in my inbox recently: "I am making a documentary for ITV1 and I'm looking for single women whose looks are holding them back from meeting someone. We are wanting to take this person to LA to have transforming cosmetic surgery on their face and body as well as being given a personal trainer, stylist, life coach. It's an amazing opportunity... "

What do you reckon? Isn't this a far worse flavour of violent misogyny than anything you'd hear in a symposium of the most block-headed golf club chauvinists? Need one add that the author of this, the producer of this tragic freakshow, is a woman? Ahhh! Sisterhood!

Beauty is love. Beauty is truth, not fake. Not fake tits, a fake tan or fake hair.

Children run in and out of the sea, teeth chattering, demanding ice-creams, or trying to drag their fathers into the water... Are these men with their tattoos and shameless beerguts not beautiful as well? Don't they love their wives, mums, dads and kids? Don't they help their elderly neighbours, do stupid things for charity, help out at the school fete and attend blood donor sessions?

So then... 'Death in Venice' - a load of old toss trying to put fancy clothes on nothing more than the unsated lusts of a frustrated pederast, or what? Discuss.

There's one good line, mind: "He delighted, as always, in the scene on the beach, the sight of sophisticated society giving itself over to a simple life at the edge of the element."

So you’re not airbrush beautiful like the models in magazines? So you can’t always get off with people you fancy? BFD. Sunshine and happy children at the edge of the element is infinitely better.