Il Casanova di Federico Fellini (1976) - film review

The debauched life of Giacomo Casanova is legendary, a succession of erotic adventures with women who are no more to him than instruments of pleasure.  Casanova’s scandalous exploits result in him being arrested and imprisoned in Venice, but he escapes and takes flight to Paris.  Here, he falls under the spell of the Marquise of Urfé, a strange mystic who coerces him into a lovemaking ritual which she believes will transform her into a man.  After an all too brief romantic idyll with the beautiful Enrichetta, Casanova finds himself alone and desolate in London...

One of the great paradoxes of Federico Fellini is that he would end up making a film about a man for whom he had next to no sympathy, and would spend three years and exhaust a colossal budget in doing so.  That film, Casanova, was to be the most problematic of Fellini’s career.  Beset by production difficulties (filming was halted twice, three producers followed in quick succession, reels of footage were stolen, etc.), it is incredible that the film was ever completed.   One of the most ambitious films to have been staged at Cinecittà studios, one sequence alone employed no less than six hundred extras.  The result evokes something of Fellini’s antipathy for his subject and (to borrow one line from the film) looks like a monumental tussle between vulgarity and poetry.

In most screen depictions, Casanova is portrayed as something of a Jack-the-Lad hero, a kind of benign Don Juan with the looks and charisma that would instantly induce any member of the opposite sex to swoop compliantly into his arms and his bed.  Fellini’s Casanova (played to perfection by American actor Donald Sutherland) is very different: an earthy and tormented creature whose amorous adventures are likened to the predictable mechanical functioning of an 18th Century automaton.  This Casanova is not someone we can readily identify with or like, although he does evoke sympathy and ultimately emerges as a tragic victim of natural forces against which he is powerless.

The depravity, self-absorption and vacuity that define this version of Casanova are reinforced by the film’s distinctive visual design.  With its dominant grey tones and lack of natural light, the film conjures up a stiflingly claustrophobic world not unlike an underground nightclub in Soho during a blackout, where the libido-consumed hero is forever trapped in an endless round of meaningless self-gratification.  There is a kind of sombre beauty in the baroque settings and the way in which these are photographed.  But it is a beauty that is recognisably false and tawdry – a mockery rather than a celebration of nature, strikingly evocative of a period in which civilised man hid his squalor and shame beneath a thin mantle of genteel gilted elegance.

In common with many of Fellini’s later films, this is a lumbering, highly stylised beast of film that, whilst unquestionably a work of considerable artistic merit, is pretty indigestible.  Watching this film in one go is like trying to trawl the entire contents of the Louvre and the Museé d’Orsay in a single day – not something you would ever really want to attempt on an empty stomach, without a flask of a suitable alcoholic restorative tucked away somewhere on your person.  However, whilst the film does place great demands on its spectator, it is a piece that any devotee of cinematic art should indulge in at least once – to appreciate its unique dream-like quality and its highly personal depiction of a man reputed to be history’s most insatiable lover.

© James Travers 2008

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