Watch Fellini's Casanova For Free

Just perfect...

Great Film overall

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

'Casanova' was Fellini's last big fil, closing more than a decade of his bigger and more ambitious movies. On one side this film is a culmination of his visual skills. Every scene is a work of art in itself, with stunning beauty, theatricality, colors, imagination without borders, populated by characters who seem to descend directly from the paintings of Bosch or Goya. More than three decades elapsed since this film was made, computer graphics revolutionized film making, and yet some of the scenes in this film could not and will not be equaled soon. Overall however we remain with a feeling of non-accomplishment. This is more an anthology of bright cinematic sketches than a whole piece of art. Even Donald Sutherland's splendid acting cannot bring together the disparate scenes of beauty into one coherent story. Amazingly, there is more to win for the viewer by seeing fragments of this film than the full work from start to end.

It's certainly important to note that Fellini thought that the historical Casanova was a scumbag, a crook even a fascist. In his film, the character appears as a scatterbrained, melancholic, mechanical tragic figure: like a marionette, a Pinocchio who never turned into a human. The story starts in Venice, Casanova's home town, with a Fellinesque carnival scene, where a statue of Venus is pulled out of the canal. This effigy with its protuberant, blue eyes is an equally powerful initial motif like the Christ figure in La dolce vita. And there we have the comparison: both films show similar dreary worlds of vices. Like Marcello, Casanova strays from one orgy to the next, screws around randomly. Donald Sutherland is remarkable, and it is intriguing to look at his unimpressed, incurious, lost soul wandering between the splendid masks and suits of the high society which makes Casanova basically another picaresque tale and like La dolce vita and Satyricon totally excessive in every aspect. And this shows Fellini's strength and weakness. The principal fault is probably the main protagonist himself. Casanova was not only a woman 'eater', but also a literarily educated man, mathematician and politician with knowledge in economy, science and occultism. Just like the French ambassador who watches the screen Casanova copulating, but leaves before he is about to say something, Fellini refuses the opportunity for the historical character to defend itself. The direction on the other hand is, as usual, masterful. What remains is a clinical, highly reserved character study, spectacular, but cheerless.

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!

And that's what I love about it, it's the true story of Casanova, an Rebellious Italian man who using his sexuality to find his place in life, the film does not contain LOADS of nudity, just many aspects of it. The film contains two midgets with a fat woman in a bathtub, a group sex involving many women in a revolving room, and silly make-up. It is truly a misunderstood and dark film; I couldn't recommend it more. I wish people would pay more attention to this film, for it is truly a masterpiece. It is a forgien film, yet you can understand with only the magnicent moving images throughout the cinematic mystery. So, yeah, I would give this film a 10/10, for many reasons