Fellini's Casanova

Fellini's Casanova (1976) is an Italian historical drama you can watch online on iFILM. Federico Fellini cast Donald Sutherland in a wax mask and then built one of cinema's bleakest portraits of masculine vanity: Giacomo Casanova as a man so consumed by seduction rituals that real feeling never gets in.

Casanova moves through Venice, Rome, Dresden and London — imprisoned, pardoned, feted, forgotten. Each encounter follows the same mechanical choreography. A nun, a hunchbacked aristocrat, a giantess, an aging marchioness. Fellini films the sex scenes as clockwork performances, scoring them to a ticking, grinding musical motif composed by Nino Rota. Production designer Danilo Donati built a false Venice entirely in the studio — no location shooting, no authentic backdrop, just constructed artifice all the way through. The costumes took home the Academy Award in 1977.

At 163 minutes it is deliberately exhausting, and that exhaustion is the point. Stream Fellini's Casanova online on iFILM.