Fellini's Casanova (1976)

Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

People, please: this emperor has no clothes. I love La Dolce Vita (seen it 7 times maybe? Own the DVD at home!) and I like 8 1/2, which, though more navel-gazing, still has something universal to say, and gorgeous visuals to display; but this Casanova (like The City Of Women" before that) reeks of personal fantasies from its director, and in spite of the glowing reviews of some bizarrely entranced people on this forum, I bet very few viewers have been entertained since 1976 by Fellini's gloomy vision of a historical character who -by the way- had a zest for life and wrote about it in such glorious language that 19th century book critics thought Stendhal was the true author of those "Memoires" (I must add: golly, I did read the real Casanova memoirs, "Histoire de Ma Vie", the whole 3 volumes in French, and it was compelling.) The movie is constructed like a wild opera, with the usual cast of Fellinian grotesques romping about in extravagant costumes, on cardboard sets I did not find particularly arresting visually, while the script throws repetitive scenes at the viewer without attempt at coherence for 2 hours. It looks and feels like the bad dream of a director who hates his protagonist, or has a beef with his own sexuality, or with women, or with the men who like to please them. In the end, it is Fellini's fears we are gawking at, and Fellini's fears at this stage of his career are overexposed, with nothing original here for the viewer to chew on or relate to. Summary: I found this Casanova to be one long, tedious, depressing and empty film.

As the owner of almost all (the available ones) Fellini films - and lover of almost all of them, I would say that to enjoy his 'Casanova' you need to (in order of importance) a) Enjoy the later films of Fellini b) Be accepting of his uniquely strange psyche and film-making of this period c) Enjoy the theatric, especially of the grotesque sort d) Be a fan of Donald Sutherland and d) enjoy period costume.If you are intrigued by the film's title and the certificate 18 rating and are expecting a soft-porn or erotic movie, DON'T click on 'add to basket' - you will be disappointed and I will get upset as your one dalliance into Fellini's World will be tainted...The sex scenes are always clothed and sent up outrageously, with farcical over-humping, shall we say....Fellini is mocking his central character here. There are some bare bottoms but that's as far as the nudity goes...Much has been said and written about the problems the director faced; daily disintegration of his relationship with Sutherland, striking technicians and outside distractions, all of which made the film more fragmentary. Fellini later cited this epic sprawl as both his worst film and as his most "complete, expressive and courageous".Donald Sutherland, with his Roman nose, shaved forehead and the most elaborate of wigs, looks the very part, so much so, that his flouncing and preening are as much of a star as he is. I'm not expert in Italian (I don't understand it at all) but the delivery of his lines sound OK, but always with theatrical bravado - no subtleties here.For most, there will ultimately be times during its 2.5 hour plus running length when it gets less interesting but Fellini certainly packs an awful lot in that time. In my view, he has made lesser films, but not many, frankly but Fellini is one of my top five all-time directors, along with Bergman, Kubrick, Wilder and Kurosawa.

And that's what I love about it, it's the true story of Casanova, an Rebellious Italian man who using his sexuality to find his place in life, the film does not contain LOADS of nudity, just many aspects of it. The film contains two midgets with a fat woman in a bathtub, a group sex involving many women in a revolving room, and silly make-up. It is truly a misunderstood and dark film; I couldn't recommend it more. I wish people would pay more attention to this film, for it is truly a masterpiece. It is a forgien film, yet you can understand with only the magnicent moving images throughout the cinematic mystery. So, yeah, I would give this film a 10/10, for many reasons

Casanova is one of my favorite films by Fellini. Besides some technical problems with dubbing Donald Sutherland's voice in Italian, the film provides an excellent portrait of the pre-French Revolution Europe. Casanova is an stallion, but is a reflective, philosophical, and critical stallion questioning the day's conventional wisdom especially when dealing with one of Fellini's favorite subjects: females and, up to a certain extinct, forcing Sutherland to do what only Marcello Mastroiani was able to do: to channel Fellini himself. I do not know the reasons why Fellini decided to give Sutherland a chance and I have to admit that Sutherland makes a great effort in playing the part. Seeing some available portraits of Casanova I can see the reasons, but one would expect Fellini to be beyond that kind of constraints. Perhaps Mastroiani was too busy (looking at was entry here in the IMDb I can see that he did 5 movies in 1976, so perhaps he was overbooked). To think of Mastroiani in this role is more intriguing when one considers the amazing rendition of the very Casanova in Ettore Scola's "La nuit de Varennes." In "La nuit..." Mastroiani plays an aging Casanova even with the odd French with a strong Italian accent that was a trademark of Casanova's charm in the may European courts where the Venetian philosopher (yes, he loved to think of himself as such). Beside these problems, the film provides a powerful critique of Europe during the 1970s, as Fellini is able to see the obvious parallelism between the 1970s and Europe in the pre-French Revolution era. The film, by the way, benefited by the then recent publication of Casanova's memoirs in a critical edition that challenged the then prevailing understanding of Casanova as a sex-pot, something that Casanova himself rejected as is possible to see in the scene of the party at the British ambassador house. After watching the movie one would think at Casanova as some sort of sex-mystic introducing in the then Enlightened West, notions about sexuality similar to those of tantric sex, although still clinging to a male-oriented understanding of sex. It is important to stress also that,despite the effort to follow Casanova's account of is life, his auto-biography is full of historical contradictions and inconsistencies.