In the Flesh: The Casanova by Federico Fellini

It begins with a woman leaving. The statue of Venus, ceremonially raised from the lagoon of Venice to commemorate the dawning of a new season, sinks back beneath the tranquil waters, the ropes supporting it snapping one by one, scaffolding and pulleys collapsing under its weight. Her eyes, which have only just broken the surface, disappear into their own reflections. She is the first of Giacomo Casanova’s (Donald Sutherland) automatons, though his reaction to her departure is hidden by his festive hood. When he encounters a second, the mechanical doll Rosalba (Leda Lojodice, giving a truly unsettling performance under stiff costuming and an Eyes Without a Face-esque mask), our protagonist is immediately smitten. Age has softened him. Women have left him, including his mother Zanetta (Mary Marquet), who needles him mercilessly for his long absence before departing without telling him her address. Casanova plies the unspeaking Rosalba with compliments, showering praise on her perfect complexion and grace before his realization that he’s really complimenting her maker leads him to fantasize about the automaton’s incestuous coupling with her “father”. Her true appeal is blatant beneath these tangents; she can’t refuse him, she can’t leave him, she can’t hate him.

Immediately after the sinking of Venus, we see Casanova await his lover, the nun Sister Maddalena (Margareth Clementi), on an island surrounded by storm-tossed waters. Fellini represents these surging waves with wetted tarpaulins made to billow by ingeniously concealed fans, an act of staggeringly contrived artifice following on an opening in which real water features prominently. Just as Casanova performs for Maddalena’s hidden lover, the French ambassador, thrusting and gyrating with theatrical vigor, Fellini is performing for us, or rather, conveying Casanova’s melodramatic sense of interiority through realer-than-real imagery. To the infamous rake life is a grand opera, a drama in which scene follows scene and the performance never ends, as in the final shot when a dying Casanova imagines himself revolving in place in the arms of his beloved mechanical woman, their faces alternating through light and shadow, flesh and lacquer, until it’s no longer clear which is which.

The film’s costumes, designed by Danilo Donati, draw heavily on the art of Hieronymous Bosch as well as classic commedia dell'arte archetypes, imparting to the film’s characters a metafictional sense that even within this fiction, they themselves are not quite of the fiction. They sustain it. They perform it. Each Syphilitic European court we visit is engaged in its own layered fictions and elaborate games, from the spit-and-swallow relay races of the decadent French and Venetian exiles in Rome to the lurid and dissolute sex games of the Duke of Württemberg (Dudley Sutton). Even the strange, desolate variant of chess the senile dowager countess plays as an aged Casanova petitions her for help with his tormentors serves to separate her from reality, to partition and render arbitrary her interactions with the world. What’s left of all of Casanova’s desperate attempts to bring a woman into his own private fiction, in the end? Ghosts in wigs and bustles fleeing across winter ice. The specter of a woman who isn’t a woman at all. A portrait pasted with wet shit to the wall above a privy hole.