Fellini's Casanova (1976)
Movie · 1976 · Drama, History · 2h 28m · R · IT
Curator score: 5.5/10 (21.4K ratings)
And Now... after four years of preparation and production...
Overview
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.
Ratings
- Curator score: 5.5/10
- IMDb: 7.0/10
- Letterboxd: 3.63/5
- Rotten Tomatoes: 58%
- TMDB: 6.9/10
Director
Federico Fellini
Production
PEA
Cast
Donald Sutherland, Tina Aumont, Cicely Browne, Carmen Scarpitta, Clara Algranti, Daniela Gatti, Margareth Clémenti, Mario Cencelli, Diane Kurys, Mary Marquet, Olimpia Carlisi, Silvana Fusacchia, Chesty Morgan, Leda Lojodice, Sandra Elaine Allen, Clarissa Mary Roll, Daniel Emilfork, Luigi Zerbinati, Hans van den Hoek, Dudley Sutton
Curator Review
Verdict
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.
Best for
- Fellini completists
- viewers who like baroque visual excess
- fans of surreal historical dramas
- people interested in sexual politics and existential satire
- audiences open to slow, stylized, highly artificial cinema
Skip if
- you want a romantic or adventurous Casanova story
- you dislike theatrical, mannered performances
- you prefer grounded historical realism
- you need an emotionally inviting protagonist
- you are put off by bleakness, sexual grotesquerie, or episodic structure
Overview
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.
Worth noting
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.
Bottom line
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.
Top Letterboxd reviews
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… more 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… more
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
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Topics
art-house, Italian cinema, period drama, surrealism, decadence, erotic satire, baroque visuals, existential, 1970s cinema, historical fantasy