User Reviews

Casanova is bawdy historical speculation, metaphysical farce, sensual overload, ironic critique of Enlightenment values. It has everything you expect from Fellini - visual clutter; dislocated tonal shifts; childish slapstick in an epic framework; Dionysian outbursts; gaudy sets; ludicrous costumes; messy gags; philosophical ruminations; European picaresque; unforgiving seas; dwarves; arm-wrestling giant princesses; aristocratic orgies; butlers and their catamites; mechanical dolls; hunchbacks and nuns in heat; mocking, otherworldly Nino Rota music; squalid grandeur; sex contests; mists of abyss; noise; the terrifying silences behind the noise. The defiance of realism is total. Just because a film isn't very original, doesn't mean it isn't worthy. Or, more importantly, great fun.

Anyone expecting, from the title, Tinto Brass 70s-style Euro-art-porn, will be very disappointed. There is precious little nudity, and the sex is ludicrous. This farcical treatment is in keeping with one of Fellini's main themes. Casanova is among the most famous names in history, a readily recognisable identity, the epitome of male endeavour and virility. And yet Fellini's concern is with the dissolution of identity, the loss of power in masculinity, the subsuming of the (usually artistic) individual in the crowd and chaos. From I Vitelloni on, and especially in the Mastroianni films, the male hero is passive, powerless, a pinball to fate. Many Fellini films burst into confusing crowd activity, the audience lost without a point of identification.

Unlike Mosjoukine's amiable and active 1928 Casanova, Donald Sutherland's is not the stud of reputation, but a pompous, long-winded bore, whose sexual technique is uninventive and monotonous. Like Don Giovanni, another legend who fails to live up to it, Casanova uses sex to ward off death, only to realise that the two are terminally linked. Forever hoping to dine with great men of letters, he is always caught in the straitjacket of his myth, and of history's sexual representations. He is the embodiment of the Enlightenment, a multifaceted Renaissance man - poet, philosopher, chemist, inventor etc - but Fellini profoundly mistrusts Enlightment values. His 18th century is not that of Diderot and Voltaire, but a continuation of Satyricon - a bestial murk where appetite, confusion and cruelty reign. History doesn't change: there is no progress, man is unimprovable - the Enlightenment was wrong.

Casanova, despite his idealistic assertions, is not a being ruled by mind, controlling his destiny, but a puppet tossed about by whim and chance. There is very little light here, much shadow and fog. Casanova's accomplishments are mocked - his poetry is ridiculous; his aphorisms banal. His intellect cannot triumph over the age so he must go mad. And, appropriately, he finds a little happiness in insanity.

Casanova is a very messy film - frustrating, sloppy, continually denying momentum. Scenes often seem not to fit, actors in key moments lack synchronicity. Yet this confusion fits the film's theme, which rejects Casanova's ironical asceticism in favour of life in all its repulsive, topsy-turvy variety. It is a melancholy film, but also very, very funny.

Federico Fellini's Casanova is quite an extraordinary film.I watched it just yesterday,late at night,and I felt charmed.Yes,it looks weird and you hardly understand what it's exactly about,but that's not the point.This film appears to be something like a dream.It's like a string of images which you cannot link using your reason.The atmosphere is magical.You can sense the corruption,the craziness in all those wild parties,the desire for pleasures that hides inside the socially repressed people of that time.Even the music by Nino Rota is weird,but it's hauntingly beautiful and it makes the whole film look like a real dream.The sounds have the power to hypnotize you.That's evident from the start.

Clearly,a piece of art.The vision of Casanova in the director's mind.A man obsessed with the female.A man in love with women in general.A man who always looks for the perfect woman.He falls in love too easily,but love always flies from out his arms,leading him to self-destruction.Until he ends up with a doll.The perfect woman.Flawless beauty.Plus,he won't be deserted.You get the sense that he's crazy,that the whole film is crazy,actually.But then you think that it's a dream and you're acting in it,too.Hypnotization...A faraway land,a faraway world.

If you have ever found yourself watching a movie like Emmanuelle and thinking: "This would be great if it were an 18th century costume drama with less nudity and enough nightmarish surrealism to make even David Lynch weep for mercy," then this is the movie for you.

Donald Sutherland plays the infamous Count Fucula, a man who tries to have sex with everything he sees that resembles a female, and whose sexual technique generally consists of laying on top of a woman and bouncing up and down on her like he's humping a trampoline - and all without ever even taking off his pants!

Short girls, tall girls, blonde girls, brunettes, girls with hunchbacks, female robots.. you name it, he tries to screw it. At one point, I thought he was going to try to make it with a giant turtle. A missed opportunity, if you ask me.

Until now, I thought Satyricon was the weirdest Fellini ever got, but this one makes it look square in comparison.

I totally disagree with the critical trend of discrediting Fellini's later films as symptomatic of his decline. Instead, I believe that Fellini's last films were actually his best. And Casanova, by far Fellin's worst reviewed film, is Fellin's masterpiece-- a sad, funny, wistful, grotesque, Rabelisian epic of a film.

In a way, Casanova is a foil to Fellini's earlier classic La Dolce Vita-- the main difference being that the former is more pessimistic in tone, while the latter is enfused with a youthful optimism. In a way, that's how the films of Fellini have progressed; his earlier films were filled with an almost child-like love for life (albeit with some very dark edges), while his later films became increasingly darker and more depressing. Strangely enough, Fellini's later films were also his best, both on a technical level, and in terms of thematic depth.

Casanova is not only the story of a man, it is also about a whole era-- an era of grand opulence and grand waste. Like in many of Fellini's other films, the protagonist of Casanova serves as a guide for us through a phantasmagoric carnival-like world. Casanova is depicted as a sexually-ravenuous, and deeply cynical man. He is constantly searching for some kind of image of the perfect woman-- an ideal which eventually leads to his own destruction.

Casanova is not a film for everyone-- despite having the usual Fellinisque scenes of ribaldry, Casanova is for the most part slowly paced (it reminds me of Kubrick's Barry Lyndon). Ultimately, Casanova, like Fellini's And the Ship Sails On, is about the passing of a golden age into oblivion. One leaves Casanova feeling both depressed, and yet somehow hopeful. Why?

Perhaps because like all great artists, Fellini realizes that in our darkest hours, we still can hold on to our memories of happier times.

Fellini's cinematic vitality was undeniably on the ebb in his later years of filmmaking, and when a director's name can blatantly headline in the film's title, a common demonstration is that he has the autocratic power over his work without any compromise, so it is a good sign for the director's devotees, but sometimes, it is also prone to backfire often due to the auteur's unbridled ego. And FELLINI'S CASANOVA is an exemplar of both cases.

Fellini is quite antipathetic towards his center figure, the Venetian gadabout Giacomo Casanova, maybe partly originates from jealousy, it is a man who is an emblem of libidinal licentiousness (with women), any heterosexual man has the right to be envious.

So loosely based on Casanova's autobiography HISTOIRE DE MA VIE, Fellini unleashes his uncurbed visual creativity to conjure up a series of spectacular mise-en-scène with a hankering for irony and symbolism, often in the form of a theatric piece. The opening gambit, a Carnival in Venice, is onerously undertook to be stupendous and eye-opening, and it is really hard to resist the enthralling allure in Casanova's each and every episode, sex activity is presumably the norm in it, but his on-screen virility brings some visual fatigue pretty soon (due to an R rating) and his action fades into mechanical repetition (certainly, the change of head-wear is a great diversion). After all, the avant-garde production design (using plastic bags to imitate a choppy sea), the 18th Century exquisite art decoration (whether accurate or not), the outlandish period costumes and flamboyant make-up (especially during the lavish banquet set) usurp the crown as the legitimate attention-grabber. With garnishment like Nino Rota's stirring score and literature reference such as Tonino Guerra's La Grande Mouna, 2 hour and 35 minutes is not that long at all.

It is also a career-defining role for Donald Sutherland, although never really being heralded (so does his lengthy and unceasing career), under some visage alteration (a fake nose and a shaved head) his Casanova is not devilishly handsome, may not even physically resemble his character, but he exerts his devotion thoroughly through his bulged eyes, which fixate on his preys with torrid resolution, simultaneously sinister and passionate. Fellini is in no mood to give Casanova a hagiography treatment, so chiefly, Sutherland's effort has been unfairly debased to ridicule and grandstanding, Casanova is much more than a womanizer who is unable to love, willfully, Fellini refuses to disclose the other side of his life, such as a bold adventurer and a luminous writer.

Female objects are never the focal point of the film, they are the objects of desire in the menagerie for our hormone-driven protagonist to conquer with intercourse, only the Angelina the giantess (Sandra Elaine Allen) and Rosalba the mechanical doll (Leda Lojodice) shed dim light on certain pathos for the fate of Casanova besides their eye-popping presence.

Altogether, FELLINI'S CASANOVA is majestic on scale, burlesque on appearance, biased in its stance, but never an awkward anomaly in Fellin's absurdist cannon.

I think this movie has been misunderstood. I have only seen it once and that was in 1978 or so. I had to write a paper about it for an art class so I paid very good attention. I think the theme had to do with loss. He lost every woman he loved starting with the statue that sank in the river. The odd circus woman, and the circus, vanished. The film was most unusual but beautiful - each scene a painting. The scenes and even the story line linger still in my mind. I have not been able to see the film again but would love to to get more insight into the many and various subtleties. The metronome for one was interesting. To me one gage of a good film is one that lingers on in your mind for years. This one qualifies.

What happens when an extravagant filmmaker makes a movie about an extravagant individual? Well, you obviously reach the height of extravaganza… but is there anything obvious with Fellini?

It starts with the title: why this juxtaposition of the two men's names? "Fellini Roma" made sense as it was the vision of a city from one of his sons, Fellini, not Visconti, De Sica or Risi. But Giacomo Casanova is a historical figure, a literate adventurer who wrote exhaustive memoirs (of undisputed authenticity) that became remarkable accounts of the 18th century customs whether in court or… intercourse, why should Casanova then be linked to Fellini as if he was belonging to him?

The reason is actually startling, Fellini didn't like Casanova, he took him as a self-centered pompous aristocrat who disguised his crass appetites under an efficient mask of sophistication… so the Casanova we see is the Casanova according to Fellini's vision and Fellini is such a larger-than-life figure that he's entitled to portray whoever he wants however he likes. But this argument doesn't hold up very well because 'Casanova' isn't just a name, it became an adjective defining a womanizer, so when the director who expressed to the fullest his lust for women and life's pleasures, makes a film about Casanova, maybe it's because there's something of Casanova in il Maestro, if he doesn't mind.

Indeed, for all his nobility, Casanova is a sex-addict, with a constant craving for the weirdest and most grotesquely unusual performances. Donald Sutherland, with his high stature, his shaven forehead, his false nose and chin and fancy clothes looks like a giant turkey, but within this weird appearance, he stands above his peers, as if his aura elevated him despite himself. He's a complex and paradoxical figure. There's a sort of running-gag where he keeps praising his intellectual and scientific merits, and he was a versatile fellow indeed, but no one ever cares for this aspect. His reputation always precedes him. Am I going too far by thinking that Fellini would share a similar frustration, being constantly associated with his baroque universe made of parties and voluptuousness? A way to show that even the brightest minds embraced sex, as a form of expression?

Now, how about women? The film is as full of sexuality as you would expect from a "Casanova" biopic, but there is something deliberately mechanical and playful in the treatment (one of the most passionate encounters is with a doll actually) as if Casanova's sexual appetites were more driven by a disinterested quest for prowess and games than one of the ideal woman. The visit of the belly of the whale could be seen as Freudian symbolism, but I don't think Casanova had such oedipal impulses as he's not even tempted to join the tourists. We all have one mother, but we can have as many women as we want; they can have motherly roles, but that doesn't seem like what Casanova is looking forward to discovering, diversity is the key.

And as to illustrate this diversity, the film is built on the picaresque episodic structure where Casanova makes many encounters with every kind of women: young, sensual, depraved, weak, fainting, chanting, pretty, freakish, ugly, the film is very repulsive but appealing in an appalling way. And maybe the greatest trick Fellini ever pulled was to confront men with the hypocrisy of monogamy, as Casanova, the Fellinian, is proved right through one simple thing: pornography. The lust for sex has reached such maturity that men aren't aroused by pretty faces and perfect bodies anymore, the uglier, the older, the dirtier sometimes, the better. Fellini and Casanove reconcile men with their polygamist nature.

And this is why I recommend not only the film, but the DVD Bonus Features. In a little documentary made before the shooting, many Italian actors were interviewed about Casanova. Ugo Tognazzi said that in the pre-Revolution period, some dishes were left deliberately rotten in order to have an extra taste or smell, appealing to gourmet tastes. A classic beauty is revered and praised, but that's not what men are looking for. The documentary is followed by a visit to a nightclub and many 'Casanovas' explain their tricks: feigning indifference, being genuinely shy, showing that they care for women, they might not all act like Casanova but they have one thing in common, they know how to create desire, and more than anything, to satisfy it. You just don't earn a womanizing reputation by being impotent. The secret is to be aroused and excited by everything, it's a discipline.

The score of Nino Rota has something mechanical about it, or experimental, but it fits the tone because Casanova took sex seriously, like an accomplished athlete looking for self-improvement, so a sensual music couldn't have worked. But I less enjoyed the sex, a bit outdated even if the treatment was deliberate, than the enigma of Casanova, a man who was ahead of his time because he understood, before everyone, one of the main drivers of society, sex and desire, and he expressed it to the fullest, and we somewhat envy him, although the word 'Casanova' has something pejorative about it, but in Italy, the perception is different, it's a part of the Italian psyche, and like Mastroianni said in the documentary, a psyche symbolized in the film's opening with a giant Venus' statue emerging its head in Venice before plunging again, as if it was all a dream.

The Venus metaphor seems to indicate some guilt behind the 'Casanova' heritage, there's a little of Casanova in every Italian man, in every men, but maybe that's nothing to be proud of. Anyway, like Macchiavelli, the man became an adjective, something our mind can relate to with more or less shame, it's only fitting that the director who made a movie about him, also inspired an adjective. Indeed, there was something Fellinian about Casanova... so the title sounds a bit like a pleonasm.

Fellini needs no recommendations. He's the Magician. And Sutherland is one of a few. Plus, he diaries of Casanova are on of the most inspirational literature works of the last centuries. These alone are sufficient. But Casanova of Fellini is something more. As Fellini feels awe (fear and worship at the same time) for women, he degrades men. From Satyricon to the City of Women men appear to surrender, give up their role and the force they once exerted over the other sex. As he deals with the story of his compatriot, Giacomo Casanova, the emblematic womanizer, he lets emerge a tragic figure, a man prisoner of his dubious reputation, a solitary creature that crawls on patios and lounges of prerevolutionary Europe, among degenerated monarchs and nobles who don't understand what is to come and have fun until boredom, The wretched Fellini hero tries to survive sometimes as stallion, sometimes as metaphysical guru and . Trying to ascend socially, he keeps falling, ending his days in a kitchen of a German lord having dinner with the servants who taunt him. He, the greater lover, finally makes love with a doll. (amazing scene). Fellini stays faithful to the text, far away from the beautification of those who grappled with this story, and Sutherland interprets one of the most tragic heroes in the cinema of the 20th century.

Fellini followed up one of his easiest films to love with one of his hardest films to love, and that has a lot to do with how the production of his Casanova came together. Dino de Laurentiis, the famed Italian producer who had worked with Fellini on La Strada and Nights of Cabiria, felt that Fellini and Casanova were the perfect marriage of artist and subject, but Fellini disagreed. He found Casanova, the historical figure sketched by himself in his memoirs written in prison, to be a disgusting, empty figure. When Fellini finally agreed to make the film, his script wasn't the happy-go-lucky adventure through European sex that Laurentiis had envisioned, so he pulled out of the project. Soon, though, Fellini had the money together from other sources and he made a movie about a subject he hated.

The movie that this recalls the most is Fellini's own Fellini Satyricon. Loosely assembled (like every Fellini film since La Dolce Vita) and an absolute triumph of production design, it intentionally has an empty heart at its core. I do think this works better than Fellini's previous opus, though its intentional distance from the main character doesn't do the movie any real favors.

The movie begins in Venice during a carnival where Casanova is summoned to a remote island where a nun waits to have carnal relations with him. The lover of a powerful man, she uses this man's residence to make love with Casanova while the man watches from behind a picture of a fish. The lovemaking is ridiculous and mechanical, set to the sound of an odd music box that Casanova carries around with him everywhere with a golden owl that pops up and down suggestively. When the performance is over, Casanova tries to present his credentials to the rich voyeur in a bid to find his way into a proper place in the upper crust of Venetian society, but the voyeur leaves without a word. That is the core of the film, and what we most get for the movie's two and a half hours is a variation of that as Casanova grows older, more tired, and less accomplished with the years.

The movie's core, Fellini's disgusted view of Casanova as a man, is really centered on the contrast of Casanova's view of himself, the world's view of him, and Casanova's inability to actually be the man he wants to be. Through many of Fellini's works is the motif of people, especially men, being completely unable to change. It's why Zampano can't learn to love in La Strada, Marcello can't commit to Emma in La Dolce Vita, or why Guido can't make a choice, any choice, in 8 1/2. That gets revisited in full here with Casanova. He shows up in a place of great wealth, ready to present his credentials and beg for a place as an ambassador or something else, and then he's presented with a sexual challenge and he forgets everything else.

This ends up turning Casanova into a tragic figure, despite the grotesque nature of himself, because he's presented opportunity after opportunity to actually improve himself, but he ends up rejecting them all to appeal to his basest instincts. He goes to Rome to visit an ambassador, and before he can fully present his idea to the ambassador, people are speaking of Casanova's supposed sexual prowess and a challenge gets proposed, pitting Casanova against the ambassador's carriage driver in how many times they can complete within an hour. Each man is given the choice of a woman, and Casanova chooses the most beautiful woman there, a model. The contrast of technique with both Casanova and the driver in frame is stark as Casanova moves like a primitive automaton. At the end, Casanova's partner slinks away, but the carriage driver's partner demands more despite Casanova having won the actual contest. Casanova wants love and recognition, but he wants sexual exploration more.

Fellini has shown his idealized woman before, and they are the kinds of women who are the height of beauty like Claudia Cardinale at twenty-five. Very few of the women Casanova pursues are of that caliber of beauty. So, you take how Marcello is willing to forget everything for Sylvia in La Dolce Vita and you apply that to nearly every woman Casanova comes across, and you can begin to see how little Fellini thinks of Casanova. Casanova loses himself over a humpback, the world's tallest woman, and the grotesquely dressed and made-up nun. He does come across women as beautiful as Claudia Cardinale, but Casanova can't keep himself to them. The chief encounter is with a woman named Isabella, played by Silvana Fusacchia. The two agree to meet in a hotel in Dresden, but as Casanova waits for the encounter that never takes place, he finds the hunchback with an insatiable lust. Instead of waiting for this beautiful woman, he decides to lose himself in a carnivalesque orgy with the hunchback.

The movie's final moments are key. Resigned to his station, Casanova dreams of the women he has had over his life, and he settles into a dance on a frozen lake with Rosalba, a mechanic sex doll he had bedded. In his dreams, she's the only woman he could ever love, a receptacle for his sexual organ and nothing more. She has no thoughts or desires of her own, just a passive acceptance of pleasing his sexual urges.

I think that Fellini could have made this point in a two-hour movie, though. The extended runtime doesn't really do the movie many favors. Reading about the movie's production in this contemporary account from The New York Times, I see that the production was extremely loose with Fellini completely changing characters and scenes when non-professional actors would show up in order to match the actors and characters more fully. He would spend weeks filming a couple pages of the script. He used his script as a guide rather than strict directions, a practice he was comfortable with, and I think Casanova would have benefited from a more structured production. He wasn't playing with memory like in Amacord or Roma, he was telling the story of a man, and it would have benefited from a clearer view of the man's downfall into a pathetic joke in a small foreign palace.

What's there for that two-and-a-half hours is never dull, though. Fellini threw himself at this project, creating a living world of plasticity in which Casanova floats. Fellini just hated Casanova, and he wanted to convince the world that Casanova was worthy of contempt, not adoration or admiration. It's interesting that a man considered a lover of women would disdain another so much, but I think the core of that contrast is that Fellini felt like he actually loved the women he bedded but Casanova didn't, that he loved no one but himself.

In a way this is the disaster Fellini has been working towards all his life. The line between absurd masterpiece and free association bullshit is very small, and what category a film will ultimately fit in will often just depend on personal feelings. That said, "Casanova" left me in cold admiration for its sets and little more that cannot be summed up more adequately by Bukowski:

"Casanova died too, just an old guy with a big cock and a long tongue and no guts at all. to say that he lived well is true; to say I could spit on his grave without feeling is also true. the ladies usually go for the biggest fool they can find; that is why the human race stands where it does today: we have bred the clever and lasting Casanovas, all hollow inside, like the Easter bunnies we foster upon our poor children."

As far as I could make it out, this is the position Fellini takes regarding his subject; granted, with more empathy, but disgusted nonetheless.

Casanova's environment is made from decay and incestuous behavior, themes Fellini dealt with more pointedly in "Satyricon". The succession of plot is characteristic of soft porn, just without the coherence; and Donald Sutherland is ugly and slimy to the point of distraction.

Yet, there might just be a point in portraying Casanova as an unsightly fool. And I challenge anybody to formulate this point without being obvious; Fellini couldn't. More than ever he seems here like a dirty old man - a maestro, for sure, but one whose impulses satisfy himself more than anybody else. I find it hard imagine an audience who enjoys this film. It was a story not worth telling.

I have but one question: Why in the name of all that we call the cosmos is this film not available on DVD (or even VHS)? It is far superior and reflects much more the times and life of Casanova than the Chamberlain film that trudged its way from start to finish. Casanova was an eighteenth-century intellectual, an intellectual with very definite proclivities for womanizing. Fellini knew his subject and the many places where his subject found himself in a lifetime of incredible sights, sounds and adventures. Get this film out of the closet, dust it off and let us have the very positive experience of enjoying it in the sanctity of our own homes. It has been too long on ice. Someone "out there", get off your duff and let us have one of Fellini's best works.

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.

There are two groups of people...those who love every Fellini movie they see and normal people. While I will admit that I have really enjoyed some of his films, I can also honestly say that I can't stand some of them. My opinion, by the way, is not just some knee-jerk reaction--I have seen most of Fellini's films and have also seen many films by the world's most famous directors. With this in mind, I feel that the most overrated and annoying directors can be both Godard and Fellini. They both have delighted in the bizarre and often unwatchable and yet have received gobs of accolades from reviewers and the "intelligensia", while the average person would never sit through some of their films. Heck, even a person who loves international cinema would generally be left out in the cold when seeing some of these films. So, since only a small clique actually watches their films and they are already predisposed to seeing the directors as geniuses, it's not surprising that their films are so often praised--it's like a cult! If you don't believe me, think about many of Godard's films such as FIRST NAME CARMEN or ALPHAVILLE,...or what about FELLINI SATYRICON or JULIET OF THE SPIRITS? These films abound with boredom, weirdness and incomprehensibility. Now I am NOT saying a film can't be weird (after all I love HAPPINESS OF THE KATAKURIS and SHAOLIN SOCCER), but it must be watchable!

Now on to this movie. Somehow, Fellini has managed to make a story about a sexually compulsive man completely boring and unsexy. This is no small task--it took a lot of work to make this so unwatchable. Instead of cheap sexual thrills, the sex acts are choreographed in a silly and annoying way while the character of Casanova is buried under so much makeup and prosthetics that Donald Sutherland looks like a ghoul. I know some of this must have been Fellini's intention, but many viewers will be left completely bored by this sterile performance--especially since Sutherland's lines are all poorly dubbed into Italian and so he neither looks nor sounds like himself! Unfortunately, when the movie is not wrapped up in these boring sexual escapades, there really isn't anything else to watch.

An interesting note about the first sexual conquest shown in this dull movie is that the actress looks amazingly like a younger version of Fellini's wife, Giulietta Masina. Considering that in addition to this, that in previous decades Fellini had Masina play characters such as a prostitute and a horribly abused woman, it seems like he may have truly hated his wife and was having this acted out on screen. I read a bit about them and their tempestuous relationship and it seems to bear this out as well. This is about the only aspect of this turgid film that I found at all interesting. Don't say I didn't warn you!

Giacomo Casanova is a writer, a wit and an aesthete. Venturing out from his native Venice and passing through the hedonistic capitals of Europe, he seeks to be recognised for his manifold and self proclaimed talents in the higher arts. But in his reckless wanderings, Casanova comes to realise that all anyone is interested in are his sexual escapades. Fellini called this film his masterpiece...

Fellini called Casanova his masterpiece. It is. However, that does not make it easy viewing, nor does it make a whole lot of narrative sense. Casanova is very much a film that requires its audience to feel rather than to think, and what is more, promises to leave them unmoved. It is a brave filmmaker who desires to pull off such a feat and a rare filmmaker that succeeds. A compelling film. PE

A beautiful and melancholic film. I've seen it only now, in a special exhibition on cinema, for the first time. Worth the while. Funny, I also used to prefer the earliest Fellini, but this film makes me, at least in this case, rethink my position. It is clear, anyway, that after 8 1/2 he could only go this way - towards a progressive abandonment of any kind of mimetic "realism".

For those that find this film "strange", I suggest to start with the early Fellini (Lo Sceicco Bianco, La Strada. Cabiria) and go more or less in order, it will probably make more sense. Or not.

Fellini's Casanova (1976)

Giacomo Casanova (Donald Sutherland) was a bit of a lad. He loved the ladies. His life was a collection of sexual escapades that whilst initially fulfilling left him feeling empty and bereft as an individual. Acclaimed director Federico Fellini's film follows Casanova through his various adventures in 18th century Europe.

We first meet the charlatan as he entertains an unseen voyeur by defiling a fake nun. Once the act has reached its climax Casanova does his utmost to impress the rich, and still unseen, voyeur by recounting his interest in alchemical research. He soon realises that he is talking to himself, literally, and leaves.

Upon arriving back on the mainland he is arrested and imprisoned for his catalogue of debauchery. He soon escapes and travels around Europe. From an aged woman looking to have her soul transformed into that of a man, through sex to Casanova, to cuddling up with a mechanical woman Fellini's Casanova is episodic and surreal.

This is cinema as art rather than entertainment but that's not to say that Casanova fails to entertain within its artistic confines. Touching upon religion, death, spiritualism, and intellectualism and, of course, sexuality Fellini drew upon the aspects of Italian society that both appalled and intrigued him with little regard to historical accuracy. Director Federico Fellini's Casanova is an exquisite feast for the senses that threatens to become more style than substance if it wasn't for the hugely charismatic performance of Donald Sutherland.

Adapted from the autobiography of Giacomo Casanova, the 18th Century adventurer and writer Fellini's masterpiece is by turns dazzling, funny and bewitching. What is even more astonishing is learning that the entire film was shot on stage – the Cinecittà studios in Rome – a monumental achievement in set and production design. Little touches such as the turbulent sea Casanova rows upon made up of black plastic sheets add to what Fellini felt was the plasticity of Casanova's life.

Original producer Dino De Laurentiis had Robert Redford in mind for the lead, but then more often than not, De Lauentiis was very rarely right in his choices (one only has to look at his career CV as a producer to see what we mean). Paul Newman, Al Pacino and Marlon Brando were also considered. Fellini refused the notion of Redford as his film's lead and, after breaking from De Laurentiis as producer Fellini, cast Donald Sutherland instead, having the actor shave the front part of his hair and don a prosthetic nose and chin.

Dreamlike and consistently enthralling Fellini's flick encompasses an individual that the noted director disliked intensely however in shooting his script he found some empathy for his lead character. He amended his initially brutal treatment of Casanova in his script focusing instead on the man's inability to love despite falling in love too easily - the inclusion of the mechanical doll and dream ending were his compensation for this.

Magical and absorbing from start to finish Fellini considered this film to be his masterpiece. He was heartbroken when the film failed to be received critically in the States. This is inconceivable! Each and every frame of the film is abundant in detail and colour, truly ravishing to behold. It's not difficult to see why Danilo Donati was awarded an Academy Awrd for Best Costume Design. Fellini regular Nina Rota composed the score that initially grates a little but becomes more haunting and enchanting as the story unfolds. An embarrassment of riches Fellini's Casanova demands your attention and deserves repeated viewings. In case you've missed it, we really liked it.

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Why hurt your brain trying to understand all the meanings behind all the images Fellini gathers into his films? Just enjoy the overwhelming flow from the master of the cinema, who gives you more things to look at and think about later than just about anyone else. A lot of it is weird and kinky and even unappealing, but why else go to the movies? I can see real life at home.

One of Fellini's more coherent and conventional films. Though I could hardly bear Satyricon, I consider "Casanova" one of the best films of all time.

The surreal nightmare world of Casanova's lost wanderings of the obscure cities of 15th century Europe comes alive and his willing enslavement to his own lust given free reign, in sex scenes which are only disturbing, could leave you wondering if you would be any different given the same freedoms. A frightening but hauntingly beautiful and poetic film. Fellini's lush cinematography was never better. The best role of Donald Sutherland's career- his performance is simply amazing.

Without reading any interviews it is obvious that director Fellini had a contempt for his subject. He called him a "stronzo" in an interview. Poor Donald Sutherland read the multi volume autobiography by Casanova in preparation, not knowing that Fellini was going to remold the historical figure to his ends. I have only only read the first two volumes myself but he comes across as a far more interesting character than in the film. Sutherland as Casanova is a grotesque caricature who moves from one situation to another. As with many Fellini films there is nothing resembling a plot and they hinge on the characters holding the audience's attention. Even if they are unlikable they should be interesting, but nothing like this is to be found here. It is his most cold, detached, and inhuman film, with no joy. There are several visually stunning moments, especially the one which opens the film as a statue head is being lifted from the watery depths of a canal before sinking. Filming took place in Cinecitta and gives the film a dreamy quality. It is not his best....nor is it his worse.

This is actually my very favorite movie of all time. And that is odd as I distinctly was disappointed with it when I first saw it. But it has grown on me over the years. Don't see this movie thinking you'll have lightweight porn from the Ancien Regime era. This is anti porn; Casanova's amours fill Fellini with disgust and contempt as do his intellectual pretensions. I've read that the entire movie is a condemnation of the Enlightenment which Fellini depicts as a fiasco. Casanova's tireless travels also serve Fellini well as a stage for his Italocentric racism. Every race in Europe is heavily lampooned; Hungarians,the Spanish, the French, the English, and most contemptible of all, the Germans. Distinctions are even drawn clearly between the racial and cultural differences between Venetians and Romans and Savoyards...

This is Fellini's last great movie. After this he seemed to get so disgusted with the modern world that he withdrew intellectually; you see this a lot in older men. They turn away then they get out of touch. After Casanova you get City of Women and Fred and Ginger. They're all terrible, very sad to see the decrepitude of a great talent. But in Casanova we can see the great man at the very pinnacle of his powers. And even the the utmost squalour there are great beauties here to admire, for Fellini loves the visual world and expresses it in film with the most original cinematography and the most wonderful stage sets. If you can find it on DVD letterbox format don't miss buying it.

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.

"Il Casanova" is probably far from being considered one of Fellini's best works, but it still undoubtedly a very entertaining, funny, visually beautiful film that tells various stories from Giacomo Casanova's life in a Fellini's manner, of cause. Co-written by Fellini himself like probably all of his other movies, this one enjoys a pretty good, witty script, that was even Oscar nominated. The film went on to win an Academy Award in a Best Costume Design category in 1976. I found it a real pleasure watching from beginning to the end, although it is not on the same level of perfection as "La Dolce Vita" or 8 1/2, Il Casanova still has a strong touch of Fellini's genius.

Highly recommendable. 9/10