Italy, 1976
Directed by Federico Fellini
With Donald Sutherland (Giacomo Casanova)
What the thing he shows her is, the giggling, affected, and silly young woman asks the famed seducer she has teased enough to draw him in a weird and lavish hiding place where she expects to experience an unforgettable carnal knowledge – with her official lover, the French ambassador to Venice, playing the peeping Tom. Displaying a strikingly sensuous, sly, and smug smile that would be rarely off his face in the course of the nearly two and a half hours the film lasts, Giacomo Casanova has lifted a cover and opened the casket he has been carrying all along – and would keep taking with him during the rest of the runtime. What appears is a kind of silver jewel representing a bird – but is it a dove or an owl, to pick up the lady’s suggestions, it is hard to say. What readily becomes clear is that the object is an automaton that signals the start of Giacomo Casanova’s sexual performance, pacing it, clocking it too.
And the automaton right away starts batting its fake wings: the sexual intercourse can start and does look a self-conscious physical performance bordering on the outrageous and the grotesque, not so much steamy than silly, more a farcical show than an erotic fantasy – it is easier to laugh at it than to be aroused by it. Still everybody, the seducer, the seduced, and the observer are satisfied – and the automaton, which has folded back its wings, can be put back in its casket and carried to other adventures.
This Giacomo Casanova may wow the women but barely spends time courting them, right away lying with them, mechanically rubbing forth and back his astonishing corset-dressed body against theirs in the shadow of the batting artificial wings and to the tune of the chirpy and strident tune composed by Nino Rota. In the highly, outlandish, personal vision of the historical character director Federico Fellini delivers – the feature’s title is quite explicit – he is merely a sex performer, driven more by a lust he barely cares to check but to the contrary is pleased to take control of the moment, as a pathetic scene showing him masturbating in a coach emphasis, than any feelings for women or worship of love. He would even unashamedly, though reluctantly, take part in a very public contest at an ambassador’s palazzo, to demonstrate he can come and make a woman come more often than a servant who has been praised for his own record lovemaking.
The point of the contest to him, and his supporters, was to prove a superior, refined mind, with an expertise in women’s sentiments and sensuality shaped by considerate and subtle observation and courtship, would always be a better lover, or to put it more precisely, a greater stallion, than any other kind of men, especially if coming from the lower classes. This points to the other face of this idiosyncratic Giacomo Casanova that Fellini highlights with the outrageously lavish and decadent scenes of meals or the implausibly delicate and exquisite clothes his lead character often wears: he is a vain person obsessed with social hierarchy and nobility, eager to sit at the top of the table, feeling as entitled to the luxury, the influence, and the respect they so naturally command in this 18th century Europe as if he were one of them – which is not the case.
Born poor in the world of entertainment, the historical Casanova had to struggle hard to make money and found a way by dealing with esoteric knowledge and the false promises it carried. This is precisely what the film illustrates: an unscrupulous fellow teetering on the edge of poverty always attempting to convince the real aristocrats they need whatever knowledge he has and whatever clever inventions he made. In fact, and tellingly, the very first sexual intercourse the film has depicted ends up surprisingly with the lead character selling himself and his ideas to the unseen envoy even as the silly lady is still basking into the ecstasy she has just experienced, pathetically pleading to be taken seriously as a welcome adviser and aide – only to realize the Frenchman has gone. The cards Fellini was eager to play have been thus put on the table fast and the film would barely stray from this biting take on the famed Venetian. An adventurer he was, perhaps, but a pitiful one always ingratiating himself to make an illusory pile in a milieu he does not really belong to, even though he shares – but then it is a matter of stubborn self-identification – the same social arrogance, till the bitter end (the last shots depict an old and grumpy Casanova complaining he does have the food he wants and mocked by the courtiers of the Bohemian duke who gave him a job of librarian).
It was also at the very start of the film that the most revelatory and sharpest contrast was drawn between the superficially brilliant but actually dull life of the lead character and the world where he was born and that he loved so much – exile has never been a pleasant option to him, both in reality and in this fiction. This beginning features that dazzling and puzzling visual extravagance, oversized and outlandish fantasies, raucous and riveting collection of folks and antics that have become a trademark of a Fellini film over the years, especially in the 1970s. His restless, yet perfectly controlled, camera records a big carnival-like celebration of the city by his electrified inhabitants. It is as flabbergasting and excessive as it is lively and cheerful, a magnificent show by night slightly dampened by a big glitch when a statue that should have been raised from deep in the water to high in the sky plops back instead.
So parties cannot avoid getting spoiled and thus the audience is warned that the titular character is going to stumble on his way to ecstasy but still parties thrown by carefree people from every walk of life and proud of their origins are definitely impressive and enjoyable. The far more lavish but also far sparser and darker spot where Casanova has sex for the first time and the other distinguished, and then less so, places hosting his sexual performances, point to a world far less lively and warm, far more of a fake and a dead end. When meeting by chance his mother in an opera where the audience has left and the candles put out or dreaming of his last love in an oddly space that seems straight from a fairy tale but has a poignant cold, bleak, quality, a nice dream in theory but with the creepy atmosphere of a bad dream, Casanova stands in a world closer to nothingness than to life or grace. Even as he battles to earn money and keeps sleeping with women while fancying he can experience true, lasting, uplifting love, this Casanova remains stuck in an uninspiring and barely energetic and colorful world. With his bizarrely, definitely unattractive, high forehead, his thin and sharp face features, and his pallor, all topping a lanky and corseted body, Fellini’s Casanova brings more swiftly to mind pictures of ghosts and criminals than the smart aristocrats of the time.
He is not the real life, and even less the real love: he is a fake who cannot enjoy life and know love. That his last romantic passion, and last carnal knowledge to make it to the screen, involves another automaton, a robot before the time the word has been coined and the stuff has started to be built, imitating a woman of the aristocracy, with brusque gestures but a lovely face and stunning clothes, cannot surprise in this regard. Only an illusion deprived of the real women’s natural reactions and desires – and the film has been keen on displaying them in the most ribald and graphic terms – could have turned into the highest note of the selfish and delirious symphony of desire Casanova was eager to play along the many tricks to survive a milieu that is as decadent and haughty as he is but at least have an authenticity and an authority he cannot claim.
The film’s forte is of course is drawback: the harshness of the portrayal is so relentless and cruel that the nearly two and a half hours it lasts may feel exhausting and even cringing. “Il Casanova di Federico Fellini” looks like an abrasive score-settling exercise the seducer Fellini was wanted to shoot and to impose at any cost. Why such a rage is hard to gather, perhaps it is useless to even reckon the why. It is a world away from the still critical, but more light-hearted, take on Casanova that director Luigi Comencini released in 1969, “Infanzia, vocazione e prime esperienze di Giacomo Casanova veneziano – Giacomo Casanova: Childhood and Adolescence” (though in this feature, Comencini offered a bleaker and more ironic view of the daily life in Venice) and of course a sarcastic rebuff of any possible idealization. It oddly fits with the conclusion of the writer of the article about the real Casanova published in the “Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender: Culture, Society, History” who claimed, after describing his life and literary career, that “Casanova is inseparable from his melancholy double: a priapic, carnivalesque ghost who lived a life on the run, a consummate conjurer in the profane cabbala of sex.” Indeed, Fellini rushes to observe and to slam this double fiercely, skillfully, wonderfully in a way. But he refuses to accept that another Casanova can also be acknowledged.