Verse
Jason, Philip K.
accidents he expects to befall him as he goes along.) But the interesting thing about the movie he ended up with is how integral---indeed, one might even say seminal-- that sunken head in the...
...It's Casanova himself nearly drowning in a suicide attempt in the Thames River...
...But there's also another strain of lovers in the film, lone women who are more important to him...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 PHILIP K. JASON DEFINITION As the thumbed mint leaf snaps back its fresh tang, I want to snap back, carom, recoil harder than the felt pressures...
...In between, this sunken sculpture goes through a variety of metamorphoses...
...I want to throw a sharp shadow back against its blankness, step out of the frame of the liquid mirrors and dry myself quickly...
...Here as elsewhere symbolism circulates through Fellini's film the way Casanova's hat floats down the Thames, on a series of swirls and eddies...
...In Casanova's case this is a progression from screwing to getting screwed...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...Images bump into us like flotsam carded along on the force, and then sooner or later they all bump into us again as we and they are swept around endlessly together...
...He is, we must always remember, a great admirer of downs...
...That is what Fellini always sees in such inane characters...
...He is as transparent as the ice on which he stands, as frozen in time as the giant head in the canal beneath him...
...It's a masthead raised from a wreck which Casanova finds in a lover's garden...
...As I mentioned in my last column, many of the women Casanova makes love to come in pairs of highand low-born...
...And yet in this final scene, with all Casanova's illusions gone and all his defenses down, Fellini grants him perhaps a certain surprising dignity, a certain nobility even...
...Like the protagonists in every Fellini film, they find themselves surrounded by grotesques...
...Like his vision of the Thames, Fellini's movies are in effect giant whirlpools in which his heroes and his audience are trapped...
...These women are the stations of Casanova's cross...
...They readily illustrate the foolishness of the whole human race, and thus they renew once again FeUini's ability to feel compassion for his fellow man...
...Where the pair of women are the high notes and flourishes, these women singly met are the low, sustaining notes in the organ fugue...
...At the end, then, Casanova remains completely unredeemed...
...but they all fade from view before they have even come near...
...In the early scenes, for instance, when Casanova mounts a woman, she is alternately eclipsed and revealed by an incredibly dark shadow Fellini has contrived to have him cast...
...But as the film goes on, Casanova himself begins moving in and out of equally severe shadows foreshadows, in effect--which life is casting on him...
...The chaos is all moving in a concerted direction, downward, like a whirlpool...
...His failings, his pretenses and his limitations are now s o obvious that he isn't even repulsive anymore...
...Having closed the scene with an underwater shot of the head resting on the bottom of the canal, Fellini returns to this image at the film's end when Casanova looks through ice that covers the canal in winter and sees the head frozen in the water below him...
...Thus, where he whips the derriere of one mistress and makes love to another who has fainting spells in an early scene, later he himself falls into a faint and is revived by a woman who uses a similar little whip on him to do so...
...It's a glimpse of his mother's head encased in the windows of her carriage in winter just as the sculpture will be encased in ice a few scenes later on...
...It's a dizzying experience, yet at times we realize dimly that there is also a progression of some sort to it...
...She is the ideal woman to whom Casanova's whole life has brought him and whose emptiness of all thought or feeling matches his own...
...In fact, he is a more vacuous figure than ever...
...They mark the episodes along the route he takes to damnation...
...The last of these grotesques, the mechanical woman, is also Casanova's last love affair...
...The truth is that Fellini is drawn to these empty heroes precisely because the pathos in them is so much more accessible...
...I want to bring myself into focus, to stop this smooth dissolving into the rest of the world...
...Sandwiched between a promiscuous nun, a giantess and a mechanical woman, the only two women who ever mattered to Casanova, Henriette and his mother, are cut off from the rest of his life...
...In that concluding fantasy scene where Casanova is on the ice of the Grand Canal in winter, all the other women from his own past approach him...
...29 April 1977:278...
...They are, in order of appearance: the nun who offers herself to Casanova in the opening love scene, a woman named Henriette who is the only one he ever truly loves, a giantess from a circus, his mother, and a mechanical woman with a clockworks he finds in a German castle...
...But the interesting thing about the movie he ended up with is how integral---indeed, one might even say seminal-- that sunken head in the opening scene is...
...He is only pathetic...
...The only one who remains, the one he dances with on the ice as the film closes, is the mechanical woman...
...He ceases to be the subject of the sentences with which his life is written and begins being the object of them instead...
...I want to be like new-cut wood turned sleek under the oiled rag...
Vol. 104 • April 1977 • No. 9
