Salvatores and Servillo, Casanova's last duel and 9 other films not to be missed at the cinema or in streaming

Salvatores and Servillo, Casanova's last duel and 9 other films not to be missed at the cinema or in streaming


THE RETURN OF CASANOVA. In the halls

Too easy to reduce The return of Casanova to a simple post-lockdown reflection on time that passes and leaves only ruins behind, on inspiration dried up by age, the decadence of the body, the need to accept oneself, the breathless trudging in front of the changing world. Too easy to quote 8 1/2 and all the other intellectual ballads about existential deadlines.
Gabriele Salvatores tells in his most heartfelt and robust film of recent years the pestiferous detachment between reality and illusion, the fatal quarrel between love and deaththe artists' need to measure themselves against mud and dust, the value of roots and the seduction of cinema which makes life more beautiful, but also the difficulty of being normal when the vagueness of desire comes. How does Salvatores keep all these suggestions together? Proceeding on a double track.
Set on a noble black / white, there the story of the over sixty-year-old director Leo Bernardi (Toni Servillo) who is unable to complete his film, the victim of a creative dispersion and an oppressive inner evanescenceoverwhelmed by memories and bad omens, pressed by the producer Alberto (Antonio Catania) who wants to bring the work to the Venice Exhibition and quickly get back from debts, helped by the good editor Gianni (Natalino Balasso), madly in love with the peasant girl Silvia ( Sara Serraiocco), a woman - a woman who hoes and milks but towards whom Leo feels an evident inferiority complex.
Bernardi's film inspired by the novel written by Arthur Schnitzler in 1918 - here is the second level of the film, complete with a narrative voice, wigs, cloaks and Venetian colors - in which we imagine the fifty-three-year-old Gran Libertino (Fabrizio Bentivoglio) returning to the lagoon many years after escaping from the Piombi, wandering around for a long time to find the courage to move forward, come across his friend Olivo (Alessandro Besentini, l'Ale di Ale & Franz), be hosted by him and his wife Amalia (Sara Bertel) who was a lover of many years beforeand fall in love with a twenty-year-old, Marcolina (Bianca Panconi), the image of the flourishing and surly beauty but also of the emancipated girl, a student of mathematics and philosophy, as well as the secret lover of Lieutenant Lorenzi who is about to leave for the war.
Marcolina does not want to know about that elderly suitor who came from the past and who recently proclaimed himself knight of Seingalt. So much so that a stratagem will be needed to overcome their resistance, until the final duel to the death: You are young, but I am Casanova.
The soldier and the seducer are facing each other, armed with blade, honor, assorted frailties. Lucky you, Casanova whispers to the dying boy, while he prepares to live his last years without splendor as a spy of the hated Council of Ten. From the Internet to eighteenth-century lace, Salvatores keeps the difficult subject close in handamalgamating the two narrative lines, integrating them into a sometimes flamboyant dialogue, full of allusions, metaphors, quotations that become new material: and as if a weight had finally been lifted from the heart. Bernardi's hyper-technological house in the Milan of skyscrapers and aperitifs clashes with his need for truth, adds anguish to his distraction.
When the home automation system goes crazy, the decline becomes total. Leo fends off the reporters by threatening to skewer them. Silvia at the first meeting asks: What is your film about?. Leo replies: About the passage of time.
Gianni's outstretched hand helps him to keep up with thechild prodigy in the odor of a golden lion. There love story with Silvia she sins of inconclusiveness: the virus of melancholy makes her cruel. The screenplay, signed by Salvatores with Umberto Contarello and Sara Musetti, does not discount: Silvia, in the face of the teacher's constant hesitations, to say the most innocent and powerful sentence in the film: I have a lot of life ahead of me and all the time to fall in love again. Strengthened by an excellent cast, Salvatores enriches the plot with surreal brushstrokes, none out of place in that mosaic that will eventually see Casanova and Bernardi, i.e. Bentivoglio and Servillo, facing each other at a table in a bar to declare defeat because the enemy is too strong and cannot be beaten, but there is a way and time to sell dearly before surrendering.

THE RETURN OF CASANOVA by Gabriele Salvatores
(Italy, 2023, duration 95')

with Toni Servillo, Sara Serraiocco, Fabrizio Bentivoglio, Natalino Balasso, Alessandro Besentini, Bianca Panconi, Antonio Catania, Marco Bonadei, Angelo Di Genio, Sara Bertel
Rating: *** out of 5
In the halls



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