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A lavish, alienating Fellini spectacle that turns Casanova into a study of emptiness, performance, and decay. It’s more fascinating than warm, but the visual invention and grotesque pageantry make it a major art-cinema experience for the right viewer.
Where to watch: Buy
Fri · 2h 28m
Director: Federico Fellini
Starring: Donald Sutherland, Tina Aumont, Cicely Browne
Imprisoned for practicing black magic, writer and adventurer Giacomo Casanova escapes and wanders Europe, using his fluid sexuality to find his place in life amid a variety of eccentric and strange characters.
Federico Fellini
Donald Sutherland, Tina Aumont, Cicely Browne
A lavish, alienating Fellini spectacle that turns Casanova into a study of emptiness, performance, and decay. It’s more fascinating than warm, but the visual invention and grotesque pageantry make it a major art-cinema experience for the right viewer.
Fellini’s Casanova is less a swashbuckling biography than a cold, dazzling autopsy of desire. Donald Sutherland plays the famous libertine as a hollow machine of appetite, moving through a world that feels built from masks, wax figures, and fever dreams rather than history. The film’s artificiality is the point: it turns seduction into ritual, and ritual into absurdity.
What lingers most is the sheer control of the imagery. Fellini stages bodies, costumes, and interiors with a sculptural sense of excess, making every scene feel both opulent and slightly rotten. The result can be funny, cruel, and hypnotic in the same breath, though its emotional distance will frustrate anyone expecting a lively character portrait.
This is one of Fellini’s most severe late-period works, and also one of his most distinctive. It’s not the easiest entry point into his cinema, but for viewers drawn to decadent pageantry, symbolic storytelling, and films that treat history as a hallucination, it’s a rewarding one.
Edwin 🦦 (3.5★) · 217 likes
35mm I haven’t watched a ton of Federico Fellini’s earlier black-and-white work yet, but even from watching clips from his earlier work, I can tell Casanova comes from a completely different phase of his career. There’s a shift toward something more exaggerated, more artificial, almost theatrical in how everything is presented. The world here doesn’t feel grounded in reality so much as it feels constructed, like a stage where emotions and desires are heightened to the point of distortion. It’s… more
Edgar Cochran ✝️🍋 (4★) · 151 likes
An orgy of miraculous mise-en-scène. There is no other appropriate way to describe it. A clear contrast is made between life and death, between reality and fantasy, between the search of something alive and the filthiness of the means used to seek it, between natural and artificial. Sutherland's best performance in his entire career highlights this as he ventures into the most wonderful act in the world between two people in the most dehumanizing way possible. There are little things… more
ScreeningNotes (3★) · 99 likes
"I am a creature of the elements, of air, of water—""—and of fire too, from what I've heard about you." Sexual politics writ large Fellini was fascinated with figurative Casanovas — his films are littered with them — so it only seems right that he eventually adapted the story of the real, literal Casanova. Curiously enough, however, he hated the character, referring to his life in an interview as a "void," and in the film he seems to wield… more
Rafael "Mister Movie" Jovine (2.5★) · 85 likes
After La Dolce Vita, Fellini went from being a modest director in terms of what he displayed on screen to just engross himself into the excess of life and larger than life characters which was present not only through this excentric characters but also the technical work, from costume to the production design became much complex and ambitious. Yet, at the same time, around the time he started to pick up on mythical stories and literaty adapations, personally speaking, he
Patrick (4.5★) · 65 likes
A giant head reveals itself from a dark river. It rises above the murky waters. Then descends, sinking into the never ending abyss. To be forgotten forever and to remain stuck. A mannequin, Casanova, the mechanical bird. The master of erotic excess, and incapable of love. Love, the most powerful emotion the human feels. Sex, the bland excuse for Love. Casanova, the notorious womanizer, the pretentious mimic of literature, and a sad fool. The sublime lover who, ironically, couldn’t love. His life… more
A key Fellini companion piece for its dream logic, self-mythology, and playful collapse of reality into spectacle.
Shares the fascination with decadence, social performance, and the spiritual emptiness beneath glamour.
Fellini’s most obvious tonal sibling: grotesque, episodic, and immersed in artificial ancient-world spectacle.
For viewers drawn to Fellini’s surreal imagery, feminine subjectivity, and elaborate visual invention.
Another Fellini world of memory, caricature, and stylized human folly, though warmer and more nostalgic.
For its unsettling erotic psychology and fascination with power, performance, and transgressive desire.
A visually sumptuous European art film about identity, repression, and stylized moral decay.
A refined companion for its erotic ambiguity, fantasy structure, and cool study of desire as performance.
Another abrasive 1970s exploration of sex, alienation, and emotional vacancy.
For viewers who like historical pageantry used to examine decline, illusion, and social transformation.
A great match for opulent period design, ironic distance, and the melancholy of a life lived as performance.
For its formal rigor, erotic intrigue, and stylized historical artificiality.
desire and emptiness, sexual politics, decadence, performance and identity, artifice versus reality, aging and mortality, power and social ritual, satire of libertinism
art-house, Italian cinema, period drama, surrealism, decadence, erotic satire, baroque visuals, existential, 1970s cinema, historical fantasy