Blu-ray Review - Felini's Casanova (1976)

Fellini’s Casanova, a cool and somewhat detached adaptation of the famed author’s memoirs, gets a Blu-Ray release this week with Donald Sutherland in the starring role. Fellini’s dislike of Casanova has been much discussed and is apparent in his treatment of a central figure who is represented here as a disconnected and largely joyless, rather than romantic, figure.

Taking in the latter part of Casanova’s life, we follow him ostensibly lurching from one bizarre sexual encounter to the next; beginning with a voyeuristic lighthouse romp with a fake nun, to a late-night tryst with a life-size mechanical doll, via a stint in prison. A man certainly possessed of intelligence, Casanova is on something of a European Grand Tour, taking in the various royal courts of the time seeking likeminded intellectuals and funding for his alchemic research. With a reputation preceding him, Casanova’s attempts to connect intellectually with his surroundings seem undermined at almost every opportunity. His escapades invariably descend into debauched madness in a film that’s both luxurious and frustratingly episodic.

If Fellini had little time for his protagonist, then the same cannot be said for his surroundings. Filmed entirely in-studio in Rome, Fellini’s lavishly beautiful production goes as far as to recreate the Venetian Grand Canal, vast interiors of Roman opera houses and German courts, and the frozen banks of the Thames. As an exercise in grand, voluptuous scene-setting, it’s represents the cream of post-war European cinema. And yet, for all its vast, visual beauty, it’s still a film that looks to emphasise inhumanity without much in the way of wit. Sutherland is intriguing in a role that could easily have set him up to look a fool, but the production lacks something truly macabre, wild or edgy.

Triumphantly magisterial in scope, yet as perversely detached as its subject, Fellini’s Casanova is a strange mix of the lavish and the hollow.

★★★
Chris Banks

Biography, Drama, History | Italy, 1976 | 18 | Mr Bongo | 7th September 2015 (UK) |Dir.Federico Fellini |Donald Sutherland, Tina Aumont, Cicely Browne, Carmen Scarpitta |Buy:Casanova (Restored Edition) [Blu-ray]