Show Business: The New Fellini: Venice on Ice

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Indeed the film is shorn of any sense of reality, historical or otherwise. Though it is hard to draw many conclusions about a movie that is not yet edited, Casanova will hardly be a picture to recommend to students interested in 18th century Venice. Fellini likes to present psychic rather than objective reality. He uses any material—literary, political, personal—and bends it to his will, makes it part of his powerful fantasies. One cannot imagine his boasting that Casanova is a meticulous biographical creation. On the contrary he says: "There is no historical slant, no ideology. There is nothing but shapes in a landscape, drawn with a bit of perspective but so representative as to be positively freezing, hypnotic." Perhaps. But the film does heat up to record what may turn out to be some of the wildest sex scenes ever filmed: Casanova and a challenger engaging in a copulatory contest, sharing two whores each in a bed that crashes and skitters right out of the room; Casanova making love to a mechanical doll whose head spins wildly at the climactic moment; the rake's encounter with a worldly nun who is expert in 39 sexual positions.

Last week Venice glowed eerily under the chill night sky over Cinecitta studios as Fellini filmed the movie's final scene. On a set as large as a football field (cost: $500,000), the city lay frozen —its Grand Canal solid ice (constructed from sheets of white plastic), the Rialto Bridge sagging under layers of snow. The scene represents the dying Casanova's final thoughts about the city of his youth. On signal from the director ("Go, Donald"), Casanova moves slowly across the ice, his black cloak fanned open by the night wind. He pauses, kneels down on the ice, his beaked nose like that of a bird of prey.

Suddenly the mechanical doll (Italian Ballerina Leda Lojodice) materializes before him, and the two dance across the ice in a final pirouette to the game of life. Watching the scene unfold, Fellini's assistant director, Gerald Morin, smiled softly. "So this is what Fellini thinks it all comes down to—a vacuous man dancing with a mechanical doll. Only a middle-aged man growing cynical could make such a statement. How sad. How honest."