Coming off AMARCORD/’73, Federico Fellini was in a very strong commercial position when he made this take-no-prisoners film about the many affairs and perversions of that real life Don Giovanni, diplomat/musician/escape-artist/memoirist Giacomo Casanova. (Mozart’s DON GIOVANNI librettist Lorenzo da Ponte knew Casanova who was even at the opera’s premiere, but unlike Federico, had the wit to have him go winless all thru the opera.) Focused almost entirely on the search for sex, love & royal commissions thru European aristocracy (from lux to deadend), the film opens with the first of many showstoppers, a Venetian Carnavale, duly followed, if not topped, by courtly staged entertainment (public & private) alongside sexual conquests & contests of stamina (private & public). As positioned for Giuseppe Rotunno’s camera, Donald Sutherland’s Casanova in coitus might as well be exercising in a rowing machine while the big production numbers play like the disastrous out-of-town try-out in Vincente Minnelli’s THE BAND WAGON. Alas, Fellini without self-critical perception on his own excesses on this never-ending 18th Century fashion show, more Baron Munchausen than Casanova. For those who hang on, things improve as Casanova’s luck & fortune desert him, the more downbeat & monochromatic life gets, the handsomer Fellini’s mise en scène. Best in a post opera sequence with stagehands coming out in the darkened theater to ‘fan’ out the chandelier candles. An enchanting effect.
DOUBLE-BILL: A passionate night with an automaton inevitably brings THE TALES OF HOFFMAN to mind. The Offenbach opera a superb vehicle for Fellini’s overelaborated late career mode . . . if only Powell/Pressburger hadn’t already overelaborated on it in 1951!
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