Film Review
The complexity and destructive power of romantic desire is a subject that
has always fascinated Benoît Jacquot, to the extent that it forms the
defining central strand of his oeuvre. In
Dernier amour, he presents
an episode in the life of the celebrated Italian libertine Giacomo Casanova
which illustrates how potent a force love can be when it takes root, driving
even the world's most famous exponent of free love to the limits of distraction.
With the help of his co-screenwriter Chantal Thomas (with whom he collaborated
to great acclaim on another grand period piece
Les Adieux à la reine),
Jacquot forces us to regard Casanova from a fresh perspective and see a little
more of the man and less of the myth that cinema has so far dwelt on.
For Jacquot, Vincent Lindon was the natural choice for the part of the great
lover. The actor and director had worked together on four films prior
to this, their mostly recent collaboration being another period romantic
drama,
Journal d'une
femme de chambre (2015). A charismatic performer who is frequently
lauded for the intensity and depth he brings to his portrayals of inwardly
warped and tormented individuals, Lindon is well-suited to play the middle-aged
Casanova as he succumbs to the most harrowing romantic ordeal of his entire
life. The actor's penchant for tortured introspection makes him ideally
suited for Jacquot's pared back, dialogue-sparse brand of cinema, and his
performance in
Dernier amour must surely rate as one his most poignant.
Lindon's bitterly conflicted Casanova could not be further from the shameless
brute portrayed by Donald Sutherland in Fellini's
famous 1976 magnum opus.
With her stunning good looks and brazen vitality, Stacy Martin is equally
well chosen for the part of the calculating miss who skewers the heart of
Casanova with an almost fiendish relish, Marianne de Charpillon. Having
shown her worth in Michel Hazanavicius's
Redoutable (2017), Martin uses
her obvious feminine charms to deadly effect in Jacquot's film, although
her character remains frustratingly opaque throughout and ends up pretty
much as the archetypal unattainable object of desire. This may be a
fault of the screenwriting or it may be intentional - after all, we are not
seeing the manipulative courtesan as she was in real life, but as Casanova
remembers her in his declining years, a female version of himself - the siren
that all men desire but none can possess.
A deliberately understated and measured work,
Dernier amour is not
the kind of film that is likely to garner a wide audience. Indeed,
with its lethargic pace and obvious dearth of plot, it struggles to fill its 100
minute runtime and were it not for Lindon's committed performance the film's
appeal would soon wear thin. Increasingly, Jacquot seems to be showing
a return to the minimalist Bressonian form of his earlier films, but in doing
so he risks alienating many of those who have been won over by his singular
style of cinema which has recently achieved a happy union of auteur rigour
and mainstream appeal. Crafted with more conscious thought than real
passion,
Dernier amour is less accessible than many of the films the
director has offered us over the past decade or two, but it still has the
power to move your heart. This is an involving adult drama that succeeds
in giving Casanova a new face through its carefully contrived marriage of
intelligence and sentiment.
© James Travers 2019
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Film Synopsis
By 1785, Giacomo Casanova, once the world's most notorious libertine, is
a morally and physically depleted sixty-year-old. Impoverished and
tired of life, he takes refuge in the Bohemian castle residence of Count
Joseph Karl von Waldstein, to write his memoirs in which he recounts his
colourful amorous exploits. Visited by an attractive young woman, he
recalls an episode in his life that still causes him anguish - for it was
the first and only time that he truly lost his heart to a woman. The
story begins when Casanova, not yet forty, arrives in London. Here,
he encounters a 17-year-old courtesan named Marianne de Charpillon and immediately
he senses that she is different from any other woman he has met.
Although she offers him little encouragement, the Venetian exile soon becomes
hopelessly infatuated with the beguiling La Charpillon. Such is his
intensity of feeling for this divine creature that the great lover loses
interest in all other members of her sex and thinks only of making her his
next conquest. But this is more than just the usual urge to gratify
his lust. Casanova has to admit that he is deeply and irretrievably
in love. Aware of the power that she now has over her infatuated admirer,
La Charpillon torments him further by refusing to yield to his powers of
seduction. Only when she is convinced of Casanova's love for her will
she surrender to him...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.