Casanova is one of my favorite films by Fellini. Besides some technical problems with dubbing Donald Sutherland's voice in Italian, the film provides an excellent portrait of the pre-French Revolution Europe. Casanova is an stallion, but is a reflective, philosophical, and critical stallion questioning the day's conventional wisdom especially when dealing with one of Fellini's favorite subjects: females and, up to a certain extinct, forcing Sutherland to do what only Marcello Mastroiani was able to do: to channel Fellini himself. I do not know the reasons why Fellini decided to give Sutherland a chance and I have to admit that Sutherland makes a great effort in playing the part. Seeing some available portraits of Casanova I can see the reasons, but one would expect Fellini to be beyond that kind of constraints. Perhaps Mastroiani was too busy (looking at was entry here in the IMDb I can see that he did 5 movies in 1976, so perhaps he was overbooked). To think of Mastroiani in this role is more intriguing when one considers the amazing rendition of the very Casanova in Ettore Scola's "La nuit de Varennes." In "La nuit..." Mastroiani plays an aging Casanova even with the odd French with a strong Italian accent that was a trademark of Casanova's charm in the may European courts where the Venetian philosopher (yes, he loved to think of himself as such). Beside these problems, the film provides a powerful critique of Europe during the 1970s, as Fellini is able to see the obvious parallelism between the 1970s and Europe in the pre-French Revolution era. The film, by the way, benefited by the then recent publication of Casanova's memoirs in a critical edition that challenged the then prevailing understanding of Casanova as a sex-pot, something that Casanova himself rejected as is possible to see in the scene of the party at the British ambassador house. After watching the movie one would think at Casanova as some sort of sex-mystic introducing in the then Enlightened West, notions about sexuality similar to those of tantric sex, although still clinging to a male-oriented understanding of sex. It is important to stress also that,despite the effort to follow Casanova's account of is life, his auto-biography is full of historical contradictions and inconsistencies.
