At least one new film should console
those myriads of viewers who frequently complain about Hollywood
that “they don’t make movies like they used to.” As Casanova demonstrates, apparently, in fact, they do. The picture
actually owes so much to so many works that precede it that it resembles dozens
of other movies from the past, which, no matter how comforting its familiarity,
still doesn’t quite guarantee a grand success.
Unlike Federico Fellini’s famous
stylized and decadent interpretation of the great lover, Lasse Hallström’s
version exploits the comic potential in the historical character, generally
playing the story and the people for laughs, most of them broad and obvious. At
times the director makes the protagonist’s exploits into something very like a
French sex farce, with a kind of musical chairs approach to various complicated
sexual intrigues. The movie employs a whole array of comic devices, including
disguises and impersonations, false names and mistaken identities, people
popping in and out of closets, and desperate escapes from blundering pursuers
like something from the Keystone Kops.
Like most costume pictures, Casanova depends as much on its visual
surfaces as on anything as ordinary as action and character, plot and people.
The director takes full advantage of the Venetian setting, with several
enchanting establishing shots of the extraordinary cityscape, numerous scenes
filmed on the canals and piazzas, and sequences in stunning palaces and
churches. The settings properly integrate with the elaborate, showy attire of
an age of baroque excess, so that the people glitter like gilded ornaments
against the exotic background of a city that itself seems an entirely splendid
work of art.
The script complicates an essentially
silly and flimsy story with material drawn from hundreds of novels, plays, and
movies. Giacomo Casanova (Heath Ledger), the legendary seducer of women,
cuckolder of a hundred husbands, irresistible even to a whole convent of nuns,
finds himself the object of Church’s inquisitors, who want to punish him for
exemplifying the rampant licentiousness and heresy of Venice.
When he foils their scheme to banish him, a more competent and vicious
representative of the Vatican, Bishop Pucci (Jeremy Irons) journeys to the city
intent on capturing, torturing, and hanging the libertine.
Whatever its ostensible seriousness,
the essentially nonsensical business provides the impetus for a muddle of other
plots, most of them based on the tradition comic obligation to unite the proper
people in marriage. Despite his history as a faithless serial seducer, Casanova
falls in love with Francesca (Sienna Miller), who writes feminist tracts under
a male pseudonym, poses as two or three other people, and manages to get
himself and his beloved arrested and tried by Pucci. The trial even includes
Francesca pleading Casanova’s case disguised as a man, right out of — you
guessed it — The Merchant of Venice.
Along the way, the director shows a
couple of sword fights reminiscent of swashbucklers like The Three Musketeers and Scaramouche,
several comic chases, and a gaggle of sight gags and pratfalls. Almost
everybody in the cast overacts outrageously, mugging and gesturing in the most
obvious manner, milking every line and situation for any possible laughs. The
actors all deliver their ornate dialogue with the precise stage British accent
that for unknown reasons constitutes the accepted vocal style of Hollywood
costume flicks.
Just about everybody in the cast
apparently resolved to chew as much of the Venetian scenery as possible,
especially Jeremy Irons, who seems to be having perhaps too much of a good time
as Bishop Pucci. Oliver Platt, who rarely disappoints, plays a very fat
merchant, at first a foolish butt of jokes who eventually saves Casanova and
all the good characters from the wrath of Pucci and the bad guys.
In a remarkable departure from his
role in BrokebackMountain, Heath Ledger plays the
title role with a proper measure of ironic self awareness, which certainly
demonstrates a singular versatility. Here, clothed in the lace and frills that
constitute dandyish dress in the 18th century, Ledger moves with a smooth
grace, speaks elegant Brit, and, like the rest of the cast, appears to be
enjoying himself immensely. Instead of the taciturn, constricted, tormented
loner of his last film, he also plays to the audience, inviting the viewers to
participate in the laughable notion that anyone would take him or the movie
seriously.
Casanova (R), directed by Lasse
Hallström, is playing at Culver Ridge, Henrietta 18, Pittsford Cinema, Tinseltown.
This article appears in Jan 11-17, 2006.
