Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #72545 in DVD
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
• Format: PAL
• Original language: Czech, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Latin
• Subtitled in: German
• Dubbed in: English, French, German
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 155 minutes

Features

• THIS DVD WILL NOT WORK ON STANDARD US DVD PLAYER

Album Description
PAL/Region 0. From legendary Italian director Federico Fellini comes this bawdy, grandiloquent tale of the world's greatest lover. Donald Sutherland stars as an aging seducer hungrily scouring the opulent boudoirs of eighteenth-century Venice in an attempt to satisfy his insatiable sexual appetite. With lush widescreen cinematography, sumptuous studio sets, and lavish costumes (Oscar winner Best Costume design), this vision of the life of a philandering dilettante remains one of Fellini's great cinematic spectacles. *Please note you will need an All Code DVD player to view. 2005.

Customer Reviews

The not-so great lover
Where else could you expect to see Donald Sutherland, Chesty Morgan, Dudley Sutton, a hunchbacked nymphomaniac, a couple of dwarves, numerous Germans on giant stools playing organs and a bloke from Are You Being Served? playing the world's greatest lover's brother than a Fellini film? Even Ken Russell could only enviously dream of such a line up. Fellini's Casanova - or to give it its more appropriate literal translation, The Casanova of Federico Fellini owes more to the Confessions and Carry On films in its treatment of sex than eroticism or even its antihero's own self-aggrandizing memoirs, but pretty much delivers everything you'd expect from latter Fellini: grand, often deliberately artificially theatrical design, over the top performances and tatty decadence on a grand scale.

In Donald Sutherland's vainglorious and ineffectual Casanova, he also has his most pathetic central character, a man with aspirations but no great genius who is reduced to little more than a performing seal by those who see through his own pretensions in an age where instant gratification is all anyone thinks about but can never really achieve. He's not much of a lover, his education and intellect rarely aspire higher than the groin and no-one pays much attention to anything he has to say - not just the perfect 70s hero but also possibly the most vicious self-portrait of an artist since Joseph Conrad poured all his self-loathing into Verloc in The Secret Agent. It's hard not to see the director's own fear that he too will be remembered as a pathetic self-parody successful only in the most trivial of his endeavours, only able to find some small delusion of fulfilment in dreams and automatons.

Fremantle's 2-disc UK PAL DVD is a pretty decent presentation, offering Italian, English and French soundtracks, which is handy because Sutherland's performance is better dubbed into Italian than in the English-language version where he uses his own voice rather unconvincingly, something the star is quite open about in the surprisingly good 45-minute interview with him on the second disc, 'Casanova, Fellini and Me.' Also included are a 53-minute documentary on Fellini and a stills gallery.

great movie, BAD transfer
movie = *****
dvd = **

I have been a huge fan of Fellini, and especially his later works, for nearly 25 years. Fellini's Casanova has always held a special place in my heart. When I was going to film school in NYC in the 90s there were rerun houses and at least two or three times a year this film would pop up in one of them, and I would always see it. No matter what. As with many of Fellini's films, it has some very odd pacing, and sometimes feels exhausting. But if you are a fan of his ambiguous, poetic, magical style, the pleasures quite outweigh the moments of restlessness.

Anyway, I had read some very good reviews of this dvd and was extremely excited to see it. All in all, I am quite disappointed. It seems to be a very low resolution digitization, and the levels have been altered brutally. Whereas the vhs I was able to track down about 10 years ago was too dark, this one has it's levels pumped too much! It seems almost over-exposed at times, and the colors are unnaturally brightened. It seems like a very cheaply done job.

That said, it has several audio versions, which is great. And the documentaries on the second dvd were absolutely wonderful. So it's well worth the money, but I still can't wait for somebody to do a good job with the picture quality.

Undeservingly forgotten, a rough yet beautiful diamond by Fellini....
This, along with City of Women, is one of Fellini's most underrated films, and one of his least seen. It's virtually disappeared from cinema circles, and has never been released on home video in North America. It was made in 1976 as his follow up to his Oscar winning Amarcord. It's one of his most visually ravishing films, amazingly surreal. It feels like a trip through the consciousness of Cassanova more than an actual film about him. It's quite striking.

It was shot entirely on a soundstage, and you can see it in both English language versions (which I believe it was originally shot in English; that's how I saw it), or a dubbed Italian version (this version actually air on Sundance channel occasionally). Sutherland is quite good as the title character, in one of his most interesting and fascinating performances. Sutherland and Fellini famously didn't get along, and Fellini had a contempt for Cassanova, finding him more of a playboy and a child unwilling to grow up. Sutherland may have thought that Fellini was taking out his anger on him. Sutherland's makeup is quite garish at times, and it took him many long hours to put it on. So Sutherland was quite exhausted by the end of the shoot, and recounts his experience in the documentary Fellini: I'm a Born Liar.

This film did poorly at the box office in both Italy and around the world, and was quite an expensive failure. It's a shame, because despite the somewhat troubled production, Fellini's Cassanova is quite a visual feast, even for Fellini. I would love to see this film on North America DVD. It's hardly ever been seen since its release.