Le Casanova de Fellini

Casanova is bawdy historical speculation, metaphysical farce, sensual overload, ironic critique of Enlightenment values. It has everything you expect from Fellini - visual clutter; dislocated tonal shifts; childish slapstick in an epic framework; Dionysian outbursts; gaudy sets; ludicrous costumes; messy gags; philosophical ruminations; European picaresque; unforgiving seas; dwarves; arm-wrestling giant princesses; aristocratic orgies; butlers and their catamites; mechanical dolls; hunchbacks and nuns in heat; mocking, otherworldly Nino Rota music; squalid grandeur; sex contests; mists of abyss; noise; the terrifying silences behind the noise. The defiance of realism is total. Just because a film isn't very original, doesn't mean it isn't worthy. Or, more importantly, great fun.

Anyone expecting, from the title, Tinto Brass 70s-style Euro-art-porn, will be very disappointed. There is precious little nudity, and the sex is ludicrous. This farcical treatment is in keeping with one of Fellini's main themes. Casanova is among the most famous names in history, a readily recognisable identity, the epitome of male endeavour and virility. And yet Fellini's concern is with the dissolution of identity, the loss of power in masculinity, the subsuming of the (usually artistic) individual in the crowd and chaos. From I Vitelloni on, and especially in the Mastroianni films, the male hero is passive, powerless, a pinball to fate. Many Fellini films burst into confusing crowd activity, the audience lost without a point of identification.

Unlike Mosjoukine's amiable and active 1928 Casanova, Donald Sutherland's is not the stud of reputation, but a pompous, long-winded bore, whose sexual technique is uninventive and monotonous. Like Don Giovanni, another legend who fails to live up to it, Casanova uses sex to ward off death, only to realise that the two are terminally linked. Forever hoping to dine with great men of letters, he is always caught in the straitjacket of his myth, and of history's sexual representations. He is the embodiment of the Enlightenment, a multifaceted Renaissance man - poet, philosopher, chemist, inventor etc - but Fellini profoundly mistrusts Enlightment values. His 18th century is not that of Diderot and Voltaire, but a continuation of Satyricon - a bestial murk where appetite, confusion and cruelty reign. History doesn't change: there is no progress, man is unimprovable - the Enlightenment was wrong.

Casanova, despite his idealistic assertions, is not a being ruled by mind, controlling his destiny, but a puppet tossed about by whim and chance. There is very little light here, much shadow and fog. Casanova's accomplishments are mocked - his poetry is ridiculous; his aphorisms banal. His intellect cannot triumph over the age so he must go mad. And, appropriately, he finds a little happiness in insanity.

Casanova is a very messy film - frustrating, sloppy, continually denying momentum. Scenes often seem not to fit, actors in key moments lack synchronicity. Yet this confusion fits the film's theme, which rejects Casanova's ironical asceticism in favour of life in all its repulsive, topsy-turvy variety. It is a melancholy film, but also very, very funny.

I think this movie has been misunderstood. I have only seen it once and that was in 1978 or so. I had to write a paper about it for an art class so I paid very good attention. I think the theme had to do with loss. He lost every woman he loved starting with the statue that sank in the river. The odd circus woman, and the circus, vanished. The film was most unusual but beautiful - each scene a painting. The scenes and even the story line linger still in my mind. I have not been able to see the film again but would love to to get more insight into the many and various subtleties. The metronome for one was interesting. To me one gage of a good film is one that lingers on in your mind for years. This one qualifies.

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.

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.

Fellini's cinematic vitality was undeniably on the ebb in his later years of filmmaking, and when a director's name can blatantly headline in the film's title, a common demonstration is that he has the autocratic power over his work without any compromise, so it is a good sign for the director's devotees, but sometimes, it is also prone to backfire often due to the auteur's unbridled ego. And FELLINI'S CASANOVA is an exemplar of both cases.

Fellini is quite antipathetic towards his center figure, the Venetian gadabout Giacomo Casanova, maybe partly originates from jealousy, it is a man who is an emblem of libidinal licentiousness (with women), any heterosexual man has the right to be envious.

So loosely based on Casanova's autobiography HISTOIRE DE MA VIE, Fellini unleashes his uncurbed visual creativity to conjure up a series of spectacular mise-en-scène with a hankering for irony and symbolism, often in the form of a theatric piece. The opening gambit, a Carnival in Venice, is onerously undertook to be stupendous and eye-opening, and it is really hard to resist the enthralling allure in Casanova's each and every episode, sex activity is presumably the norm in it, but his on-screen virility brings some visual fatigue pretty soon (due to an R rating) and his action fades into mechanical repetition (certainly, the change of head-wear is a great diversion). After all, the avant-garde production design (using plastic bags to imitate a choppy sea), the 18th Century exquisite art decoration (whether accurate or not), the outlandish period costumes and flamboyant make-up (especially during the lavish banquet set) usurp the crown as the legitimate attention-grabber. With garnishment like Nino Rota's stirring score and literature reference such as Tonino Guerra's La Grande Mouna, 2 hour and 35 minutes is not that long at all.

It is also a career-defining role for Donald Sutherland, although never really being heralded (so does his lengthy and unceasing career), under some visage alteration (a fake nose and a shaved head) his Casanova is not devilishly handsome, may not even physically resemble his character, but he exerts his devotion thoroughly through his bulged eyes, which fixate on his preys with torrid resolution, simultaneously sinister and passionate. Fellini is in no mood to give Casanova a hagiography treatment, so chiefly, Sutherland's effort has been unfairly debased to ridicule and grandstanding, Casanova is much more than a womanizer who is unable to love, willfully, Fellini refuses to disclose the other side of his life, such as a bold adventurer and a luminous writer.

Female objects are never the focal point of the film, they are the objects of desire in the menagerie for our hormone-driven protagonist to conquer with intercourse, only the Angelina the giantess (Sandra Elaine Allen) and Rosalba the mechanical doll (Leda Lojodice) shed dim light on certain pathos for the fate of Casanova besides their eye-popping presence.

Altogether, FELLINI'S CASANOVA is majestic on scale, burlesque on appearance, biased in its stance, but never an awkward anomaly in Fellin's absurdist cannon.