DVD Review – ‘Casanova’
4/26/2006
Posted by Frosty
 |
|
|
|
|
|
Review by Kyle Alvarez
“Casanova” represents the most stale and possible uninteresting way one could ever make a movie about sex. It’s a sexless sex film, a movie that both tries to epitomize romantic comedy values but also tries to capitalize on the feminizing ways of its titular character. It does this for a broad appeal, in an attempt to target its primary demographic… women. This is approach seems entirely inappropriate for a story that is innately degrading to women, a movie about a man who took pride and became infamous from how many women he was able to seduce. By over sighting this aspect, turning Casanova’s womanizing ways into immature slapstick humor, Lasse Hallstrom’s “Casanova” is mostly uninteresting, predictable and trite from its first minute.
The acting is decent enough in the movie. While Heath Ledger is not even nearly as captivating as he was in “Brokeback Mountain,” he certainly carries the film and fills it with enough charm to make his performance entertaining. The female lead, Sienna Miller, on the other hand is the opposite of Ledger’s charisma. Miller is a current rising star, picking up plum parts in both commercial features, such as this, and more indie fare, such as the starring part in the Edie Sedgewick biopic coming up. I can’t understand for the life of me her appeal. While she is certainly beautiful to look at, but she seems to get lost in the crowds, her face indistinguishable and her personality bland. Lena Olin, a great female actress in the film, is massively underused and it was a disappointment to not see her character have much development. Oliver Platt is also good in the film, though I am not sure why he garnered such critical acclaim with such a obviously comedic and superficial character.
The film’s look is overwhelmingly beautiful; most of this effect is attributed to the entire film having been shot on location in Venice. There are only a few films I can think of off the top of my head that take place in the city, and this may be the only one that takes advantage of the locations so well. The city is just so beautifully photographed it sometimes hardly matters what’s happening on screen. It’s a massive undertaking and it’s executed brilliantly, using a lot of digital effects in order to give a convincing portrait of how Venice must’ve been at the time. This kind of eye for detail and accuracy would’ve served the film better if they had approached the story and pacing with the same kind of attention.
Video / Audio / Extras
The special features on the disc are quite good. The first featurette, titled “Creating an Adventure”, shows off the film’s best quality: the fact that it was shot in Venice. The filmmakers go into great detail over just how difficult it was too shoot in the city but also how great and beautiful the experience must’ve been. There is another brief documentary called “Visions of Venice” that covers the same material as the first and its redundancy made it feel as if it should’ve been omitted, or its material combined with the former. After seeing these featurettes, I can’t deny anyone who would not have wanted to be a part of the picture as it was almost entirely shot on location. It’s also interesting to see the amount of special effects needed, though not all of them successful, to make Venice look authentic to the time of the film. It’s too bad the story and script was not as inspired as the way the locations were chosen and photographed.
Another much shorter featurette on the disc, which is hardly as interesting, summarizes the work that went into the film’s beautiful costuming work. While it’s interesting to hear how much thought gets put into the color and style a character might wear, the costume designer doesn’t seem particularly excited, speaking in a droll and uninterested voice that makes it hard to get us as excited about her work as all the actors seem to be.
There is an ‘extended sequence’ of one scene that appears later in the film. The sound work is barely finished; as well as some special effects work, making the sequence distracting and difficult to follow. Also, by the time I got to watching the scene, I had pretty much already forgotten its context in the film and, also, the relevance of these missing scenes to the film. In other words, the extended cut of this chase hardly seems relevant enough for one to go out of their way and actually watch.
Director Lasse Hollstrom provides an audio commentary on the disc that is relatively harmless. He comes across as a man proud of his film but also he speaks very sporadically, only dropping in every once and a while to present us with details of what he put into the film. I also found little insight in what he had to say, pointing out the obvious quite often and focusing more on talking about the music than anything else. What is interesting in listening to him speak is just how little history there actually was to the story, how the legend of Casanova has been changed and skewed over the years that very few historical facts were left to actually build their story off of. If only this theme had been one used more greatly throughout the film, it would’ve added a larger sense of intrigue and believability than to what is there.
Final Words
There is a good film to be made out of the “Casanova” story, but this certainly is not it. Where the film goes right is in its production values and in making the story have the tone of a fun adventure farce. Where it misses is that in making a movie about sex, they somehow found themselves with a prudish film, immature in the way it deals with Casanova’s seduction of women.
|
Home |
Contact Us |
About Us |
Advertising |
Privacy Policy |
Terms of Use |
RSS |
Site Map