Le Casanova de Fellini

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.

What happens when an extravagant filmmaker makes a movie about an extravagant individual? Well, you obviously reach the height of extravaganza… but is there anything obvious with Fellini?

It starts with the title: why this juxtaposition of the two men's names? "Fellini Roma" made sense as it was the vision of a city from one of his sons, Fellini, not Visconti, De Sica or Risi. But Giacomo Casanova is a historical figure, a literate adventurer who wrote exhaustive memoirs (of undisputed authenticity) that became remarkable accounts of the 18th century customs whether in court or… intercourse, why should Casanova then be linked to Fellini as if he was belonging to him?

The reason is actually startling, Fellini didn't like Casanova, he took him as a self-centered pompous aristocrat who disguised his crass appetites under an efficient mask of sophistication… so the Casanova we see is the Casanova according to Fellini's vision and Fellini is such a larger-than-life figure that he's entitled to portray whoever he wants however he likes. But this argument doesn't hold up very well because 'Casanova' isn't just a name, it became an adjective defining a womanizer, so when the director who expressed to the fullest his lust for women and life's pleasures, makes a film about Casanova, maybe it's because there's something of Casanova in il Maestro, if he doesn't mind.

Indeed, for all his nobility, Casanova is a sex-addict, with a constant craving for the weirdest and most grotesquely unusual performances. Donald Sutherland, with his high stature, his shaven forehead, his false nose and chin and fancy clothes looks like a giant turkey, but within this weird appearance, he stands above his peers, as if his aura elevated him despite himself. He's a complex and paradoxical figure. There's a sort of running-gag where he keeps praising his intellectual and scientific merits, and he was a versatile fellow indeed, but no one ever cares for this aspect. His reputation always precedes him. Am I going too far by thinking that Fellini would share a similar frustration, being constantly associated with his baroque universe made of parties and voluptuousness? A way to show that even the brightest minds embraced sex, as a form of expression?

Now, how about women? The film is as full of sexuality as you would expect from a "Casanova" biopic, but there is something deliberately mechanical and playful in the treatment (one of the most passionate encounters is with a doll actually) as if Casanova's sexual appetites were more driven by a disinterested quest for prowess and games than one of the ideal woman. The visit of the belly of the whale could be seen as Freudian symbolism, but I don't think Casanova had such oedipal impulses as he's not even tempted to join the tourists. We all have one mother, but we can have as many women as we want; they can have motherly roles, but that doesn't seem like what Casanova is looking forward to discovering, diversity is the key.

And as to illustrate this diversity, the film is built on the picaresque episodic structure where Casanova makes many encounters with every kind of women: young, sensual, depraved, weak, fainting, chanting, pretty, freakish, ugly, the film is very repulsive but appealing in an appalling way. And maybe the greatest trick Fellini ever pulled was to confront men with the hypocrisy of monogamy, as Casanova, the Fellinian, is proved right through one simple thing: pornography. The lust for sex has reached such maturity that men aren't aroused by pretty faces and perfect bodies anymore, the uglier, the older, the dirtier sometimes, the better. Fellini and Casanove reconcile men with their polygamist nature.

And this is why I recommend not only the film, but the DVD Bonus Features. In a little documentary made before the shooting, many Italian actors were interviewed about Casanova. Ugo Tognazzi said that in the pre-Revolution period, some dishes were left deliberately rotten in order to have an extra taste or smell, appealing to gourmet tastes. A classic beauty is revered and praised, but that's not what men are looking for. The documentary is followed by a visit to a nightclub and many 'Casanovas' explain their tricks: feigning indifference, being genuinely shy, showing that they care for women, they might not all act like Casanova but they have one thing in common, they know how to create desire, and more than anything, to satisfy it. You just don't earn a womanizing reputation by being impotent. The secret is to be aroused and excited by everything, it's a discipline.

The score of Nino Rota has something mechanical about it, or experimental, but it fits the tone because Casanova took sex seriously, like an accomplished athlete looking for self-improvement, so a sensual music couldn't have worked. But I less enjoyed the sex, a bit outdated even if the treatment was deliberate, than the enigma of Casanova, a man who was ahead of his time because he understood, before everyone, one of the main drivers of society, sex and desire, and he expressed it to the fullest, and we somewhat envy him, although the word 'Casanova' has something pejorative about it, but in Italy, the perception is different, it's a part of the Italian psyche, and like Mastroianni said in the documentary, a psyche symbolized in the film's opening with a giant Venus' statue emerging its head in Venice before plunging again, as if it was all a dream.

The Venus metaphor seems to indicate some guilt behind the 'Casanova' heritage, there's a little of Casanova in every Italian man, in every men, but maybe that's nothing to be proud of. Anyway, like Macchiavelli, the man became an adjective, something our mind can relate to with more or less shame, it's only fitting that the director who made a movie about him, also inspired an adjective. Indeed, there was something Fellinian about Casanova... so the title sounds a bit like a pleonasm.

I totally disagree with the critical trend of discrediting Fellini's later films as symptomatic of his decline. Instead, I believe that Fellini's last films were actually his best. And Casanova, by far Fellin's worst reviewed film, is Fellin's masterpiece-- a sad, funny, wistful, grotesque, Rabelisian epic of a film.

In a way, Casanova is a foil to Fellini's earlier classic La Dolce Vita-- the main difference being that the former is more pessimistic in tone, while the latter is enfused with a youthful optimism. In a way, that's how the films of Fellini have progressed; his earlier films were filled with an almost child-like love for life (albeit with some very dark edges), while his later films became increasingly darker and more depressing. Strangely enough, Fellini's later films were also his best, both on a technical level, and in terms of thematic depth.

Casanova is not only the story of a man, it is also about a whole era-- an era of grand opulence and grand waste. Like in many of Fellini's other films, the protagonist of Casanova serves as a guide for us through a phantasmagoric carnival-like world. Casanova is depicted as a sexually-ravenuous, and deeply cynical man. He is constantly searching for some kind of image of the perfect woman-- an ideal which eventually leads to his own destruction.

Casanova is not a film for everyone-- despite having the usual Fellinisque scenes of ribaldry, Casanova is for the most part slowly paced (it reminds me of Kubrick's Barry Lyndon). Ultimately, Casanova, like Fellini's And the Ship Sails On, is about the passing of a golden age into oblivion. One leaves Casanova feeling both depressed, and yet somehow hopeful. Why?

Perhaps because like all great artists, Fellini realizes that in our darkest hours, we still can hold on to our memories of happier times.

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.

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.