Italy, 1969
Directed by Luigi Comencini
With Claudio De Kunert (Giacomo Casanova as a child), Leonard Whiting (Giacomo Casanova as a young man), Raoul Grassilli (Don Gozzi), Lionel Stander (Don Tosello), Wilfrid Brambell (Malipiero), Maria Grazia Buccella (Zanetta Casanova, the mother), Mario Peron (Giacomo Casanova, the father), Clara Colosimo (Giacomo Casanova’s grandmother), Cristina Comencini (Angela Rosalba Mocenigo), Senta Berger (Countess Giulietta Cavamacchia)
A lonely kid, skinny and sickly, illiterate and impoverished, has his life turned around overnight when his parents, who left Venice for London eight years earlier, after the mother gave birth to him and got her own mother’s forgiveness for a marriage that the old woman condemned, move back to the tiny city-state. The father, who has the same first name, hopes to get rich by selling telescopes, a small optical invention that is well-known in England but a novelty in Venice. Partly deaf and aging, he also hopes, with far more naivete, he can curb his wife’s eccentric and sensual ways, preventing her from going back to the theater business (the idea she would become thanks to her elopement an actress was what horrified most her mother) and more simply from flirting too much. The amazingly provocative, feisty, madcap Zanetta Casanova would not, however, accept to be tamed, quite the opposite, offering to her bewildered but fascinated eight year-old son an unforgettable vision of female beauty and exuberance.
Giacomo Casanova the father dies during the surgery that was ironically supposed to save his life. Minutes before this dismaying performance of what a conceited surgeon of the time thought was the best medicine, he managed to make an influential member of the Venetian ruling elite promise to protect and help his son. The aristocrat does keep his promise, but in his own, stingy and shifty way: Giacomo Casanova the young is sent to Padua to study in what turns out to be an appalling boarding school where food is disgusting and beds spread on the floor. The teacher the greedy and vulgar women running the place hired, Don Gozzi, decides to take the boy, who has struck him as remarkably gifted, away and into in his own house and to see to it he gets the best education. As it happens, Giacomo Casanova would also find out for the first time what loving a woman, in this case the sister of Don Gozzi, means.
The film then jumps ten years later. Now nearly 18, Giacomo Casanova, who is studying hard to become a priest but is yet to be fully and formally ordained (but that should not be long to take place), is back to his native Venice (but keeps writing to Don Gozzi in Padua, the words of his letters complementing the images). He is attached to a middle-aged, old-fashioned, stern, seasoned priest, Don Tosello. But the priest soon makes him an assistant of a very old, haughty, wealthy former political leader, Malipiero. Malipiero is not without a stunning flaw given his age and ugliness: he is terribly lecherous and fancies to be a womanizer still. Living with the aristocrat starts to draw the otherwise quiet Giacomo Casanova to the luxury and vanity of the Venetian high society and to the game of seduction stunning women like to play.
His own natural beauty, and his intellectual abilities, soon make him a magnet for the ladies, to the despair of Don Tosello. He slowly becomes aware of what it could mean to him as he strives to carve up a position in the society and is tempted by pleasure and love. He foolishly accepts to come to a secret appointment he thought was sent by a young nun he met hobnobbing with gracious and mischievous aristocratic ladies, Angela Rosalba Mocenigo. But he gets into serious trouble. Far from feeling sheepish, he willingly gets drawn to a far older and far more sensuous and teasing lady, Countess Giulietta Cavamacchia. He loses his virginity, tries to repent, but is again ensnared in the problems of Angela Rosalba Mocenigo. The young lady does not want to be married with the man her parents have chosen and dreams instead of the young priest. Giacomo Casanova seems tempted, though a bit baffled by the fast-moving events around him. But when he realizes she want to run away and to live discreetly, poor but happy, with plenty of kids, he would rather ask Angela Rosalba Mocenigo’s cousins to help him to escape such a horrible future – and enjoy the bodies of those very beguiling young women who symbolize nicely what his life would therefore be till his death.
Based on the memoirs the famous libertine wrote, “Infanzia, vocazione e prime esperienze di Giacomo Casanova veneziano – Giacomo Casanova: Childhood and Adolescence” might have been a cheerful tale of a sensual awakening. But it is first and foremost as a candid depiction of the spell cast by wealth and luxury but the colors and the lights are not really as bright as the diamonds great ladies wear around their necks or ornamenting a pair of shoes. The celluloid reels may have aged but the dullness of the images is part of a deliberate attempt to show Venice as it was probably was in the second quarter of the 18th century when Giacomo Casanova was a child and then an adolescent (he was born in 1725 and died in 1798). This is a bold, awesome effort to depict down to the minutest detail, in an unvarnished and gritty style owning little to the vedute paintings celebrating the landscape of the city (but still clinging to the idea of capturing teeming crowds as they carry on with their daily lives), the actuality of the world where the fiction is settled. The film is as much about a man, or rather a boy trying to grow up, as about his civilization.
Venice is here a bleak and grimy town where poverty and inequity are conspicuous, the famed carnival barely concealing the gap between poor trying to get by and an elite blatantly self-satisfied. This is also a society mired in worldviews that are starkly divergent but always rooted in old tenets and terrible misconceptions. Enlightenment may be beckoning beyond the city and now feels to modern audiences a foregone conclusion but the mad surgery killing the lead character’s father is a reminder of how little knowledge was mastered and how arrogant were those holding that modicum of science.
They were, moreover, a minority: Catholicism was paramount and Don Gozzi rightly explains to his pupil that the ecclesiastical career is still the best option to be successful. But that does not keep other views from swaying the wider population: after all, the first non-relative Giacomo Casanova meets, at the request of his grandmother, is a witch.
All those elements are introduced vividly and frankly, on a fast pace: director Luigi Comencini, who has already showed a special attention to childhood with films like “Incompreso – Misunderstood” in 1966, is keen to capture the raw liveliness and crude ways of the Venice he invites us to rediscover away from conventional views and cinematic tropes. Relishing in irony and eager to surprise, he likes to linger on troubling or absurd moments still having a genuine comical dimension, starting with that unfortunate surgery, and his camera, set in cramped spaces and tiny streets, roves around actors of the daily life as fluidly and powerfully as it tracks the main characters shaping the fate of Giacomo Casanova.
As for the libertine’s progress: the big idea is simply to suggest how his mother cast a spell on him but barely underlining how the generous body and expansive attitude of the lady could have stirred premature lust. In fact, it is the wider perspective of fun mixed with lavishness as much as with sensuality that seems to prompt the young priest to change tack. What triumphs is a refined, selfish, carefree sense of pleasure pitching the young man, fortunately enough for him, far away from the dull reality of Venice and right into the bosom of that teasing but puzzling enigma called women (if he was bewildered by the fanciful ways and words of his mother he remains as bewildered by the sensuality and desire of the cousins of Angela Rosalba Mocenigo).