KISS, KISS, WINK, WINK: A Studly Heath Ledger
Romps and Flirts in the Clever 'Casanova'
BY TERRY LAWSON
DETROIT FREE PRESS MOVIE CRITIC
January 6, 2006

'Casanova'

*** out of four stars
Rated PG-13; sexual themes
1 hour, 50 minutes

One of the legendary and, of course, mandatory tourist traps lining Venice's Piazza San Marco is the Caffe Florian, Giacomo Casanova's own Starbucks.

A table identified as the preferred perch of the legendary player's player is a few feet away from one said to have been utilized by another infamous romantic: Woody Allen.

As men who engaged in scandalous affairs of the heart and philosophical arguments of morality, Allen and Casanova can easily be imagined sharing a cup of Italian roast after a screening of "Casanova," a clever farce starring Heath Ledger as the ultimate rogue.

It's a film that one can also imagine Allen making after, say, "Love & Death" and before "A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy."

Instead, it's Lasse Hallstrom, a Swedish director whose career has gone in the opposite direction of Allen's, who directs it. Hallstrom started off wanting to be Bergman ("My Life as a Dog"), and worked his way back to featherweight entertainments like "Chocolat."

"Casanova" finds Hallstrom more inspired, or at least lively and engaged, than he has been in years, and he's in the company of the actor of the moment.

Heath Ledger is Hallstrom's Casanova and, while the timing is probably coincidental, the film's arrival on the spurs of Ledger's Oscar-nomination-bound portrayal of a cowboy involved in a long-term homosexual relationship in "Brokeback Mountain" should dispel any suspicion that Ledger is just a pretty one-trick pony.

Italian as "Casanova" may be, with its boudoir-door-slamming, identity-mix-up mischievousness -- not to mention its cheerful assault on social convention -- it couldn't be more French.

After a prologue in which an aged fellow puts his quill to what we understand to be memoirs, we are taken back to 1753 Venice, where Casanova is already an underground legend, much talked-about, little-cornered.

With the tactical assistance of his faithful if long-suffering manservant Lupo (a very funny Omid Dajlili), Casanova has been wooing and wowing his way through the city, always a few steps ahead of agitated fathers and fiancées and the pleasure-negative Catholic church, whose local representative the Doge (Tim McInnerny) protects him from the unamused masters in Rome.

But with the Inquisition on the move, the Doge suggests that if Casanova were to marry, it would be read as a sign of repentance for his wicked, wicked ways. So Casanova sets his tender trap for the beautiful Victoria (Natalie Dormer), a most endangered species: a Venetian virgin. Victoria is, however, all too eager to relieve herself of this burden with Casanova, much to the dismay of secret admirer Giovanni Bruni (Charlie Cox).

The romantic Giovanni has grown up pining for Victoria from his apartment across the way. He's under the thumb of his widowed mother (Lena Olin), whose precarious financial situation made Giovanni's free-thinking older sister Francesca (Sienna Miller) agree to marry Papprizzio (a scene-stealing Oliver Platt). Papprizzio is a rich merchant and importer of lard from Genoa, soon to arrive to meet the bride he's never seen and finish the negotiations for the impending nuptials.

To give away the ensuing comic and romantic complications would not just be unchivalrous, it would also be something like impossible. But the mechanics hinge on Casanova's quite unexpected feelings for Francesca, Giovanni's campaign to save Victoria from Casanova's clutches, and the arrival of the Inquisition's most enthusiastic supporter, Bishop Pucci (Jeremy Irons), who never met a sexual impulse he did not want to suppress and extinguish.

One's appreciation for all of this may all but completely depend on one's appreciation of farce, because Hallstrom wholly understands that any effort to pass this off as natural or rational would be as irrational as the Inquisition. I add the modifier "all but" because the alluring natural attributes of Dormer, Miller and Olin as well as Ledger and Cox would make "Casanova" worth gaping at even for those resistant to well-timed theatrics.

It should be noted that despite its theme, "Casanova" is bereft of nudity or anything sexual aside from innuendo that would be tame by network TV standards. That is less a cop-out than an acknowledgment of Casanova's naive conviction that if there were a supreme power, he might want us to enjoy life without guilt -- at least for a couple of hours.