Fellini’s Casanova presents a very simple question to its viewer: what kind of cinephile are you? The film is essentially plotless, intentionally silly and far too long, but it features superb costuming, an incredible score and delights in its own satirical framework. A quick glimpse at the film’s Letterboxd page will reveal that Fellini’s Casanova has many ardent fans, and even its detractors acknowledge the masterfulness of its craft. That said, however, this is not top-tier Fellini. On that point, there is nearly universal agreement, though it is worth mentioning that Fellini himself supposedly regarded it as his best film.
The film, Fellini’s first English-language effort, follows the trysts of the eponymous Giacomo Casanova, played by a prosthetic-burdened and overly made-up Donald Sutherland, as he literally humps his way across 18th-century Central Europe. As had become characteristic of all late Fellini films, Casanova is basically enormous, its incredibly expensive set pieces nominally and only barely connected by the script. As such, the “story” in the film does not really exist; the viewer just browses through scenes in the life of Casanova in a mostly chronological order. What the film is most famous and celebrated for today is the mise-en-scène that went into each of its boisterous and increasingly unhinged set pieces. For example, Casanova won the 1977 Academy Award for Costuming.
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It is apparent that Casanova is supposed to be a hilarious and satirical spoof making early modern European nobles out to be drunk, sex-crazed and hypermasculine buffoons. The issue with the film having such a purpose is that the late ‘70s already have two far more successful such satire-based period films: Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon and Gilliam’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Next to those titans, Fellini’s humor falls flat and the satire does not really connect. Casanova is, by comparison, flaccid and vacuous.
Fans of Casanova do not trouble themselves with worries about the film’s bronze medal-status in terms of late ‘70s satirical period pieces. Instead, they center their admiration on the set pieces. Each one was carefully constructed in the massive Cinecitta studio complex in Rome, where the entire film was shot. The most famous of these scenes is the opener, set in Venice during Carnival. This one features a massive statue of Venus being winched up out of the canal waters as hundreds of onlookers try to determine the meaning of such a thing. The scene cost an incredible sum―and even had to be reshot after burglars stole the film reels to hold for ransom―and it establishes the film’s stilted and poorly accomplished satirical tone. Other beloved set pieces include an enormous number at the Dresden opera house, a one-on-one sex duel at a party in Rome between Casanova and a pretender to the titular character’s notorious prowess and a drunken piano duet conducted by men perched on ladders. When it comes to massive and exciting visual spectacle—if the viewer can overlook the ugly stylized lighting so common of continental “art” films of the era that softens textures and dulls colors—Fellini’s Casanova is over-appointed. Consistent with the film’s supposed satirical basis, some of the set design is intentionally bad; the most famous example is an early scene with a boat on a “sea” so obviously made from black plastic garbage bags that the viewer cannot help but realize that Fellini is fucking with them. But again, that is really all that the film has to offer.
It is probably worth pointing out that the film had a particularly cursed production history. In addition to having several of its reels held hostage, the film was plagued by sickness (both Sutherland and Fellini were forced into inaction by illness), Fellini’s increasingly dictatorial and bullying style and the death of two of Fellini’s good friends in the Italian cinema community, the directors Luchino Visconti and Pier Paolo Pasolini (who was murdered in what is still an unsolved case), which made the famously mercurial director even moodier than usual. Given such a history and late-career Fellini’s singular obsession with stentorian, stunt-like set piece spectacles—and concomitant disinterest in filmic storytelling—it is a wonder that Fellini’s Casanova is at all watchable.
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