Fellini's Casanova (1976)

FELLINI'S CASANOVA  (1976)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Federico Fellini
    Donald Sutherland, Tina Aumont, Cicely Browne,
    John Karlsen, Daniel Emilfork Berenstein
It's just as well that the filmmaker put his own name on the title of this, as a warning, or at least as a qualification. It's not a biopic as much as it is a dreamscape, a long, strange, episodic, lavishly designed vision of life in the courts and salons of 18th-century Europe. Donald Sutherland plays the famous spy, musician, adventurer, librarian and self-described ladies' man, and while it provides irrefutable proof of his courage as an actor, it's not a performance that brings Casanova to life. That probably has less to do with 
Sutherland than with Fellini, who's much more intent on posing his beautiful grotesques in exotic, colorful settings and playing them off against each other. Early on, there's a shot of Casanova rowing a boat over the sea at night, and it's obvious that the moonlit waves aren't real water but billowing sheets of plastic. Fellini makes no effort to conceal the fakery, suggesting that he's not interested in picturing life as it was or might have been, but the way some half-mad artist might have painted it. The movie will be slow going for some, but it's an undeniable eyeshow, the human carnival as only Fellini would imagine it. Weird and then some.