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‘Fellini’s strange, hyper-stylized adaptation of Giacomo Casanova’s memoirs rivals even Satyricon for sheer visual extravagance and pageantry — and as a divisive work in the Fellini canon! Donald Sutherland stars as the notorious 18th-century libertine, whose cold, obsessive, mechanical devotion to fornicating, Fellini suggests, hides a terrible void within. The film follows Casanova as he escapes imprisonment in Venice and embarks on a debauched tour of the courts of Europe. Events are rendered in a series of sumptuous, almost ritualistic tableaux; the breath-taking art direction is by Danilo Donati (Satyricon, Roma, Amarcord), whose efforts earned the Oscar for Best Costume Design. Like Kubrick’s near-contemporaneous Barry Lyndon, another lavish, painterly film that initially took a critical drubbing, Casanova has been reappraised, by some at least, as a radical, remarkable cinematic spectacle.’ The Cinémathèque

R18+ | High level sex scenes

R18+