«The decline of Casanova and the passage of time between reality and fiction»- Corriere.it

«The decline of Casanova and the passage of time between reality and fiction»- Corriere.it


Of Valerio Cappelli

In Bari the film by Gabriele Salvatores on the libertine portrayed as an old man in a story that, in a double narrative line, also tells a director at the end of his career. Fabrizio Bentivoglio appears completely (and courageously) naked in a duel




CHEAT Now he's just a dusty man. That libertine, once a dispenser of happiness and momentary pleasures, has bags under his eyes, wrinkles on his neck, sagging cheeks, swollen veins in his hands, which are the hands of an old man.

There is a double narrative track in
"The Return of Casanova" by Gabriele Salvatores, at the Bif&st in Bari and in theaters from Thursday to 01. The man consumed by the pursuit of pleasure, with the face of Fabrizio Bentivoglio, is 60 years old, has been thrown from life, time has slipped through his fingers now swollen, extinguished the spells of his youth. Having ceased the ancient splendor around Europe, he just wants to return to his Venice, and he circles around it like a beakless eagle. And instead of speaking it seems to croak, with his hoarse voice.

But the real protagonist is Toni Servilloin the role of the film director who has no intention of accepting his slow decline, and in his latest work he wants to tell the eighteenth-century hero by making him leave the pages of Schnitzler, pulling a script out of that courtly language.

And yet this great actor, on his first meeting with Salvatores, accustomed to dense reasoning, he does not see it as a story about lost youth: «The story is taken from Schnitzler, who wrote the cruellest novel about old age. He vivisections the subject, like a butcher who cuts the quarter dark. The aspect that both he and the film insist on is physical decay». Casanova tells it in a scene in the mirror, and above all in the duel with swords between him and the young rival, where he appears completely naked in a courageous way. Bentivoglio, who was a handsome young man, was interested «by not having foreseen ageing, being unprepared to age, I recognized this element which humanizes him compared to the stereotype of Casanova. I don't need to kill a young man in a duel to understand that I'm getting old."

Grabbing a scrap of life, Servillo killing his double, he kills youth. This terrible subject of the passage of time, and above all of seduction, which has a lot to do with both his character and his profession, the actor does not experience on himself with anxiety or fear, and here he liked «the vanity and the frivolity with which Salvatores tells it puts him in a situation of indulgence that makes him likeable». His Casanova even loses a tooth while he plays with a prostitute. «In its attempt to always repeat itself, it's destined to end badly - says the director - it's the first film that talks a little about me. The doubts, the questions of these years».

Schnitzler unfolds issues after issues, rivalry breaks out between the two directors, because the impersonated author of Servillo is joined by a young colleague who has only shot one film and is already crying out for a miracle, as he flies to Venice. This is a losing duel. "I've seen all of his films," the young colleague tells him. And he, in a breath of a voice, full of resentful disdain: "I have the impression that he didn't see them well."

Toni, and how do you live the rivalry? He smiles: «I'm still a happy spectator, I don't have flirtations and I'm grateful to actors and directors who give me great films or plays. There is a new generation that I admire very much». Servillo pulls out of his sack full of books a phrase attributed to various writers, according to which life is what happens to us while we are busy with other projects. In reality, life takes up space for him and he clumsily tries to juggle between the profession of director and life, which is a love encounter with a girl (Sara Serraiocco), a peasant woman who brings him back to earth, to the values ​​of the land with its specific needs. Meanwhile Casanova in one last flicker seeks the belated admiration of the young Marcolina, played by Bianca Panconi, his only admiration today is addressed to the actor Servillo, while the libertine from the film leaves the scene with words that resonate like a bitter epitaph: «Don't I am the one of yesterday nor the one of today. I am not: I was".

The theme of the double, dear to Schnitzler and borrowed from his friendship with Freud, in the film it is expanded and implemented also with the double chromatic use: historical scenes in color for Casanova, and in black and white for the contemporary ones of life as it is, with the director played by Toni Servillo . In this ferocious clash between love and death, the double physical decadence of the libertine and the director who narrates it is a delicate homage to Bernardi Bertolucci, who lived his twilight in a wheelchair.

March 26, 2023 (change March 26, 2023 | 21:14)



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