"Casanova" stars Heath Ledger as the legendary lover. With all the downer serious movies out now, this low-brow but high-spirited costume farce set in Venice in 1753 is a welcome relief. Ledger, the star of "Bareback Mounting," plays Casanova in the withering, clench-jawed style of George Sanders, one of my all time favorites (best known today for "All About Eve," where Sanders portrayed the corrupt drama critic Addison DeWitt squiring the young Marilyn Monroe, whom he introduces as "a graduate of the Copacabana School of Dramatic Art").
In the opening scene, the Inquisition accuses Casanova of sneaking into a convent and fornicating with a novice. "Well, I'd hardly call her a novice," Ledger mutters dryly in classic Sanders style. Ledger looks bored with and contemptuous of the proceedings, which was Sanders's trademark.
It says a lot about the conservatism of contemporary sexual mores that this 2005 version of "Casanova" devotes only the first five minutes to his amorous career and the rest of the movie to the indefatigable one discovering the joys of monogamy. (The movie is a soft R, closer to PG-13.)
Unfortunately, Sienna Miller is dull in an awful role as the anachronistic butt-kicking babe and proto-feminist nag for whom Casanova implausibly forswears all other women in the world. All the critics complain that there are no good roles for women these days, but nobody has the guts to blame the lack of sexy leading roles on feminism. Unless you have a major fetish for women-with-weapons (which a lot of nerds seem to have these days), it's hard even to notice actresses these days. (Check out how uninspiring the front-runners for the Best Actress nomination are here.)
The ending is borrowed from "Cat Ballou," but when you set anything in Venice, even when you've seen it all before, there's still plenty to look at.
In "Casanova," young Sienna Miller is betrothed to her late father's cousin's son, a rich merchant of Genoa. Her still sexy mother, played by aging bombshell Lena Olin, who is bored with being a widow, sympathizes with her daughter's reluctance to marry a man she has never met, but points out that that her own arranged marriage to her enormously fat father was rapturously happy.
The plots of romantic comedies are inevitably formulaic, so I'd like it if screenwriters would make it standard practice to routinely add a subplot pairing off the thwarted Ralph Bellamy character with somebody more suitable than the leading lady. Ralph's never going to get Rosalind because he's not Cary. But then, who is? So, why should he be abused for not being Cary Grant? Help him find some happiness too. My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
""Casanova""
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