Casanova

A beautiful and melancholic film. I've seen it only now, in a special exhibition on cinema, for the first time. Worth the while. Funny, I also used to prefer the earliest Fellini, but this film makes me, at least in this case, rethink my position. It is clear, anyway, that after 8 1/2 he could only go this way - towards a progressive abandonment of any kind of mimetic "realism".

For those that find this film "strange", I suggest to start with the early Fellini (Lo Sceicco Bianco, La Strada. Cabiria) and go more or less in order, it will probably make more sense. Or not.

If you have ever found yourself watching a movie like Emmanuelle and thinking: "This would be great if it were an 18th century costume drama with less nudity and enough nightmarish surrealism to make even David Lynch weep for mercy," then this is the movie for you.

Donald Sutherland plays the infamous Count Fucula, a man who tries to have sex with everything he sees that resembles a female, and whose sexual technique generally consists of laying on top of a woman and bouncing up and down on her like he's humping a trampoline - and all without ever even taking off his pants!

Short girls, tall girls, blonde girls, brunettes, girls with hunchbacks, female robots.. you name it, he tries to screw it. At one point, I thought he was going to try to make it with a giant turtle. A missed opportunity, if you ask me.

Until now, I thought Satyricon was the weirdest Fellini ever got, but this one makes it look square in comparison.

I have but one question: Why in the name of all that we call the cosmos is this film not available on DVD (or even VHS)? It is far superior and reflects much more the times and life of Casanova than the Chamberlain film that trudged its way from start to finish. Casanova was an eighteenth-century intellectual, an intellectual with very definite proclivities for womanizing. Fellini knew his subject and the many places where his subject found himself in a lifetime of incredible sights, sounds and adventures. Get this film out of the closet, dust it off and let us have the very positive experience of enjoying it in the sanctity of our own homes. It has been too long on ice. Someone "out there", get off your duff and let us have one of Fellini's best works.

While Don Juan and Lothario are literary constructs, entirely fictional, Giacomo Casanova like De Sade {15 years his junior} was a flesh and blood historically verifiable person. Casanova was born in Venice 286 years ago in 1725 and he died 73 years later in 1798 having witnessed the fall of the Age of Decadence and the transformation brought by the French Revolution. That his name is synonymous to this day with the successful pursuit of sexual conquest is due to the fact that Casanova was a great writer who recorded his life in a 12 volume opus titled "The Story of my Life". This episodic work of literature apparently describes in detail Casanova's amorous victories on the sexual battlefield claiming and describing the seduction of at least 120 different woman.

Fellini, the year after Pasolini made his illustration of De Sade's literary perversity in Salo, brought this illustration of some of the episodes of Casanova's sexual exploits. The movie opens with the masked Carnival depicting Venus, {the goddess after whom Venice was named} rising out of the sea as her ancient Greek source goddess Aphrodite did before her. The masking of the revellers was an encouragement for the participants to ignore class differences and thus increase the scope of orgiastic interaction sponsored by the patron goddess of Love, Venus,

A masked man receives a letter proposing an assignation on an island palace with a woman masquerading as a nun, Casanova, revealed to us as a Dandy in extravagant attire of opulent and decadent fashion. Although historically dark haired Fellini portrays Donald Sutherland, {with false nose and jaw}, as a convincing Casanova, a foppishly ringletted blonde. As this is a cinematic examination of the life and technique of one of the most outrageous ladies man in modern history, the viewer is immediately introduced to Giacomo's modus operandi or seduction formulae. Casanova is not a bully but is much more adept at exploiting female gullibility with poetic declarations of deep and undying love which he combined with his peacockish appearance and intimate confessions of ardent desire and you have the story of his life in a nutshell, Other attributes that also helped garner his reputation was the reputed size of his penetrative organ and the athleticism of his ability to maintain sexual intercourse for long extended periods with an economy of repeated but unvaried thrusts leading eventually to orgasm. This delaying technique similar to "karezza" and tantric practices helped spread the name of Casanova as the ultimate stud of all time.

Apart from his reputation as a sexual libertine Casanova was eloquent and funny. The ability to make people laugh has always had aphrodisiac stimulation. After the conquest of the pseudo-nun Casanova has success with a neurotic young girl whom he cures from constantly fainting with a dose of sex magic. In a later episode we are introduced to the soirée' of Madame D'Urfee who believes that impregnation by Casanova would lead to the passing of her soul to a male child and then onto immortality. Casanova had performance problems with her as she was an ancient wrinkly and his ability to raise an erection had to be assisted by one of his lovers who had to amusedly stand by his side and wiggle her rear in order to facilitate his potency. It worked and Casanova made off with one of the many fortunes he made and lost during a life of spontaneous and opportunistic self-invention.

Among the most memorable set pieces that Fellini orchestrates is a wonderful dance in exquisite costume at the dinner provided by the hunchback and a young male ballerina. The costumes throughout the movie are fantastic. After the dance Casanova voices his disagreement with the notion that the male is the tempter. Henrietta, his lover at the time {played by the gorgeous Tina Aumont} is to leave him in one of the great blows he suffered in his sexual adventures. She managed to bring some sense of emotional loss which went beyond Casanova's usual rhetorical protestations of besotted love.

The Nino Roti score of sad music box lament and Casanova's most prized possession - his phallic winged mechanical toy which like a metronome allowed Casanova to keep a steady thrust. Apart from overwhelming woman with the false flattery of his supposed personal interest Casanova also reveals in the sex competition at the Prince Del Brand's Palace that he has an energy drink containing raw eggs and ginger and cinnamon, which he uses to keep his erection for up to an hour.

What happens to the ageing Casanova hundreds of years before the coming of Viagra? In Freud's theory the sexual energy with no capacity for expression becomes channeled to more productive outlets. In Casanova's case his last 12 years were spent writing and revising his major work "The Story of my Life"

Fellini chose to give the mood of the movie a certain disappointment as if Casanova was never satisfied and always a depressive in nature, but this does not make sense, as it stands to reason that as a young man part of Casanova's attraction was as a bon vivant, raucous, bawdy, randy and full of life. However the movie is styled as Fellini's Casanova and the odyssey it depicts - the life of Casanova - has been described as the greatest autobiography ever written.

That such a man existed is historical proof that some men are closer to the gods than anyone else. Fellini gives you sumptuousness and thought, {it is reputedly Fellini's personal favorite of all his oeuvre}. However, Bunuel on viewing the movie walked out before the end. I found it interesting as a working study of satyriasis and nymphomania which are fields rarely examined by auteurs.

Fellini followed up one of his easiest films to love with one of his hardest films to love, and that has a lot to do with how the production of his Casanova came together. Dino de Laurentiis, the famed Italian producer who had worked with Fellini on La Strada and Nights of Cabiria, felt that Fellini and Casanova were the perfect marriage of artist and subject, but Fellini disagreed. He found Casanova, the historical figure sketched by himself in his memoirs written in prison, to be a disgusting, empty figure. When Fellini finally agreed to make the film, his script wasn't the happy-go-lucky adventure through European sex that Laurentiis had envisioned, so he pulled out of the project. Soon, though, Fellini had the money together from other sources and he made a movie about a subject he hated.

The movie that this recalls the most is Fellini's own Fellini Satyricon. Loosely assembled (like every Fellini film since La Dolce Vita) and an absolute triumph of production design, it intentionally has an empty heart at its core. I do think this works better than Fellini's previous opus, though its intentional distance from the main character doesn't do the movie any real favors.

The movie begins in Venice during a carnival where Casanova is summoned to a remote island where a nun waits to have carnal relations with him. The lover of a powerful man, she uses this man's residence to make love with Casanova while the man watches from behind a picture of a fish. The lovemaking is ridiculous and mechanical, set to the sound of an odd music box that Casanova carries around with him everywhere with a golden owl that pops up and down suggestively. When the performance is over, Casanova tries to present his credentials to the rich voyeur in a bid to find his way into a proper place in the upper crust of Venetian society, but the voyeur leaves without a word. That is the core of the film, and what we most get for the movie's two and a half hours is a variation of that as Casanova grows older, more tired, and less accomplished with the years.

The movie's core, Fellini's disgusted view of Casanova as a man, is really centered on the contrast of Casanova's view of himself, the world's view of him, and Casanova's inability to actually be the man he wants to be. Through many of Fellini's works is the motif of people, especially men, being completely unable to change. It's why Zampano can't learn to love in La Strada, Marcello can't commit to Emma in La Dolce Vita, or why Guido can't make a choice, any choice, in 8 1/2. That gets revisited in full here with Casanova. He shows up in a place of great wealth, ready to present his credentials and beg for a place as an ambassador or something else, and then he's presented with a sexual challenge and he forgets everything else.

This ends up turning Casanova into a tragic figure, despite the grotesque nature of himself, because he's presented opportunity after opportunity to actually improve himself, but he ends up rejecting them all to appeal to his basest instincts. He goes to Rome to visit an ambassador, and before he can fully present his idea to the ambassador, people are speaking of Casanova's supposed sexual prowess and a challenge gets proposed, pitting Casanova against the ambassador's carriage driver in how many times they can complete within an hour. Each man is given the choice of a woman, and Casanova chooses the most beautiful woman there, a model. The contrast of technique with both Casanova and the driver in frame is stark as Casanova moves like a primitive automaton. At the end, Casanova's partner slinks away, but the carriage driver's partner demands more despite Casanova having won the actual contest. Casanova wants love and recognition, but he wants sexual exploration more.

Fellini has shown his idealized woman before, and they are the kinds of women who are the height of beauty like Claudia Cardinale at twenty-five. Very few of the women Casanova pursues are of that caliber of beauty. So, you take how Marcello is willing to forget everything for Sylvia in La Dolce Vita and you apply that to nearly every woman Casanova comes across, and you can begin to see how little Fellini thinks of Casanova. Casanova loses himself over a humpback, the world's tallest woman, and the grotesquely dressed and made-up nun. He does come across women as beautiful as Claudia Cardinale, but Casanova can't keep himself to them. The chief encounter is with a woman named Isabella, played by Silvana Fusacchia. The two agree to meet in a hotel in Dresden, but as Casanova waits for the encounter that never takes place, he finds the hunchback with an insatiable lust. Instead of waiting for this beautiful woman, he decides to lose himself in a carnivalesque orgy with the hunchback.

The movie's final moments are key. Resigned to his station, Casanova dreams of the women he has had over his life, and he settles into a dance on a frozen lake with Rosalba, a mechanic sex doll he had bedded. In his dreams, she's the only woman he could ever love, a receptacle for his sexual organ and nothing more. She has no thoughts or desires of her own, just a passive acceptance of pleasing his sexual urges.

I think that Fellini could have made this point in a two-hour movie, though. The extended runtime doesn't really do the movie many favors. Reading about the movie's production in this contemporary account from The New York Times, I see that the production was extremely loose with Fellini completely changing characters and scenes when non-professional actors would show up in order to match the actors and characters more fully. He would spend weeks filming a couple pages of the script. He used his script as a guide rather than strict directions, a practice he was comfortable with, and I think Casanova would have benefited from a more structured production. He wasn't playing with memory like in Amacord or Roma, he was telling the story of a man, and it would have benefited from a clearer view of the man's downfall into a pathetic joke in a small foreign palace.

What's there for that two-and-a-half hours is never dull, though. Fellini threw himself at this project, creating a living world of plasticity in which Casanova floats. Fellini just hated Casanova, and he wanted to convince the world that Casanova was worthy of contempt, not adoration or admiration. It's interesting that a man considered a lover of women would disdain another so much, but I think the core of that contrast is that Fellini felt like he actually loved the women he bedded but Casanova didn't, that he loved no one but himself.