Reviews

http://www.exile.ru/2003-December-12/kino_korner.html This movie is disturbing not only on the criminal/sexual level, but much more so in the way that it exposes human denial like no film before it. Denial is really the protagonist of Capturing The Friedmans. Denial is about the most gut-twisting villain in cinema history. I will give you one example. The police intercepted a child porn magazine from the Netherlands being shipped to Arnold, the father. He got busted. The police sat his wife, Elaine, down and explained to her why they had arrested her husband. The wife is a sullen, intelligent, rather cold and gloomy Jewish woman, while the three boys and their father are all goof-offs and hams, loud and annoying and full of energy.

The police showed Elaine her husband's child porn magazines, pictures of young boys getting sodomized or sucking some old man off. But as she confessed, "I looked at the magazine, I looked at the pictures, and I still didn't see what was wrong with them. I didn't see what the police were talking about, and I told them that. Even though the pictures were right there in front of my face." Turns out the entire house was stacked with kiddie porn mags, and in all their years of marriage she had never even seen them.

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.