Federico Fellini
Il Casanova

Fellini Federico - "Il Casanova" - 1976

The misty and hypnotic piano notes of maestro Nino Rota drip in the studios, while the dolly glides the phallic third eye of the Maestro over the semi-submerged face of a giant female statue emerging from the sea-Venice-Cinecittà-Great Mother: another Fellinian dream unfolds, this time incarnated in the mythologem of the quintessential Latin-universal lover, "Casanova." Donald Sutherland is perfect in this role, the resemblance is striking, and he masterfully brings out a superhuman, all too human, in the midst of a century of mediocrities, dragging himself away from humble origins, from the seminary, from prisons, from the ever-looming poverty thanks especially to his overbearing animal magnetism, his sexual megalomania, the mesmerizing phallic fluid with which he will make his way through courts and brothels, orgies and tender loves, effeminate moonlit courtships and peremptory duels, ingenious inventions and spectacular declines.

Fellini's Casanova is lost behind his demon, his stars, his fluids, his horoscopes, and his fraudulent alchemies—but deep down, even when he defrauds the marchesa D'Urfé with the philosopher's stone, he somewhat believes it: inventor of the quintessentially cabalistic game, the Lotto, Casanova throughout his life will try to make gold, that is, to quickly multiply his fortunes, along with the worldly icon of himself as a living myth; but Fellini, perhaps a bit autobiographically, places his hero and his Great Work under the Black Sun of melancholy, in the shadow of often shattered dreams of glory and the few true unfortunate loves, until he becomes an increasingly mechanical phallus, a disillusioned cicisbeo, less pragmatic than the official hagiography or even his own Memoirs represent.

The mythical virility has become more and more mechanical, warns Fellini, already a designated victim was the great Casanova: the mythical seducer is fascinated by automatons, whose construction in the full Enlightenment century had become a very honored profession in 18th-century courts. Before his trysts, he winds a mechanical bird with an incorporated music box that sings of his master's erotic exploits with a robotic little march in waltz time—a prelude to the future roboticity of music in the century of great classical music composers!-.
Snow falls, old Casanova, tired and alone at the end of his life, has an open-eyed flashback in front of a frozen lake: he reviews his life, the Pope in carriage, the elderly mother, and among the hundreds of lovers he had and the true love that always eluded him, he regrets one woman in particular.. the white mechanical doll -sic- met in a court, with whom he had danced and had an improbable tryst. Fellini manages to convey with this very sad scene an infinite desolation, the sense of cold, melancholy, abandonment, the life's feast slipping away like a sudden imposture, drawn by the triumph of the Winter God and the lunar doll as a foreboding of a macabre dance with death: I reviewed my life, I cried..

Funereal Fellinian prophecy of the end of the seductive male, the Latin lover? Or will man's last true woman be a robot created to his desire because real women will have become asexual androids? Years before Blade Runner, Fellini's film posed unsettling questions.