Customer Reviews

Fellini's Casanova [ NON-USA FORMAT, PAL, Reg.0 Import - Australia ]

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I must admit to being an inveterate Fellini fan - I don't know what the sixties would have been without the string of great flicks which followed the seminal La Dolce Vita. That being said, Casanova was made in the mid-seventies - toward the end of the master's career - and is the work of a mature artist. Is Casanova an old man's film? In some ways, one has to have lived a bit to fully appreciate its humor, pathos, and greatness. I say, in my limited viewing of thousands of films (most before 1990), relative to the hundreds of thousands others have watched, Casanova ranks as one of the great historical re-creations, a sort of cinematic counterweight to Max Ophul's Lola Montez - and one of Fellini's most coherent, serious, and profound statements.

But none of these accolades could apply without the surprising, tour de force performance of Donald Sutherland (Keifer's daddy), who plays the legendary courtier. For those who are unaware of Sutherland Sr's career , he was `discovered' by Jane Fonda while he was gigging as a DJ in British Columbia, became a noted hunk on the Hollywood party scene, and started making films alongside his thoroughbred and talented girlfriend. O.K. Women loved him - but an acting talent? After many a mediocre performance, exactly how or why I do not know, he was cast by Fellini, of all folks, as Casanova. His date with destiny had arrived. And, somehow, like the proverbial understudy called on to star on opening night, or the bench player called on to start the biggest game of the season, he more than rises to the occasion. He gives the performance of a lifetime.

I have not seen the most recent film version of Casanova. However, there are scenes in Fellini's Casanova, such as the dance with the homonoculus, which are transcendent in their existential weight. Not a film for a keg-bash, an orgy, or a light laugh. Rather, an extended meditation on the emptiness to which the romantic impulse often leads, and how pearls before swine often end up trampled by them. A must see for the serious at heart, and about the heart.

It's Fellini, so of course it's very good. But I couldn't tell when I ordered this made-on-demand release whether the DVD transfer was 'letterboxed' or true widescreen. It is true widescreen, and a nice transfer with very good image quality. I think now only Fellini's 'La voce della luna' remains unavailable on DVD. I hope someone is able to remedy that absence soon.

ANOTHER ONE OF FELLINI'S MASTERPIECES, ALONG WITH "LA STRADA", "SATIRICON", "AMARCORD" AND "8 AND 1/2"...

THIS FILM'S SCRIPT ,PHOTOGRAPHY, MUSIC AND ACTING IS SIMPLY OUTSTANDING!!!!..NOT TO MENTION FELLINI'S OWN VISION AND DIRECTION OF DONALD SUTHERLAND, WHO PERSONIFIES THE FAMOUS SCHOLAR, SEDUCER AND LOVER.

THE FILM DEPICTS CASANOVA AS A SEXUALLY INSATIABLE SCHOLAR AMONG THE CONTEMPORARY NOBILITY, WHO LEADS A VAGRANT'S LIFE.

HE WOULD SEDUCE ANY WOMAN, REGARDLESS OF HER AGE, SOCIAL, POLITICAL, INTELLECTUAL OR RELIGIOUS CONDITION.

THE MUSIC ADAPTATION FITS EVERY SINGLE SCENE IN THE FILM!!

A FILM ENTIRELY SHOT AT CINECITTA STUDIOS IN ROME, AND THE MOST CONTEMPORARY MASTERPIECE OF THIS ACCLAIMED DIRECTOR.

After reading about this film for years but having it never been widely or easily available, I finally caught up with it. I had seen most of Fellini's other more "popular" works and Casanova seemed to be considered a failure, too expensive, compromised in its production and editing (shot in English learned phonetically, ran out of money). It is also later in his career, and a meditation on age, waning fame and sexual prowess, a kind of self-reflexive film Fellini had been doing since "8 1/2" and through the '70s ("Roma" and "Intervista" seem clearly about being Fellini as much as the places they take as subjects, also "Director's Notebook").

Viewed, finally, in context "Casanova" is a nice mid-point between the stylish alter-realities of "Satyricon" and "Juliet of the Spirits" and the smaller yearnings about age, love and mortality such as "City of Women" and "Ginger and Fred." This expensive and surprisingly dour epic, beautiful as always but deeply melancholy, is the glue holding Fellini's loose fantasies and unbridled power to the later anxiety over television, memory, and yearning for a prior age that may never have been (his Venice is not near to the real one, except as a dream-state replication). Sutherland's sweaty neediness, silent and smoldering glares and sore back suggest a defeated glamour that is strangely sexless, reduced to mechanical (literally) reenactment of the basest human activity, sexual union, performed for unsure, dishonest or forgotten reasons.

This subtext, considering Fellini's subsequent engagements with orchestra rehearsals on ships, dancing partners on television shows, and dreamers who fly away to the moon, inform "Casanova" as an important late-career highlight, with an autobiographical element of an artist whose out of favor, going through the motions, able to please others if not himself. That this film seems to foreground the character Casanova's self-loathing (unlike most of Fellini's others - he "loves the sinner, hates the sin") makes this feel too cynical, baroque, no fun, not as effervescent as many others. Still, essential.

Everyone who's been to Venice should see this film. It was not filmed there. But Fellini clearly knows Venice very well, and this movie is a kind of expressionistic homage to a failing 18th-century empire. Not 5 stars, because despite the fascinating sets, costumes, actors, set pieces etc., the brilliant Fellini is terribly cold -- as always.