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Casanova Our rating: Your rating: 1 2 3 4 Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: R (for some sexual content) Genre: Romantic Comedy Theater release: December 25, 2005 by Touchstone Pictures Directed by: Lasse Hallström Runtime: 1 hour 48 minutes Cast: Heath Ledger (Lord Jacomo Casanova), Sienna Miller (Francesca Bruni), Jeremy Irons (Instigator Pucci), Oliver Platt (Lord Papprizzio), Lena Olin (Lady Bruni) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

It's probably unfair to compare and contrast two films just because they star the same actor and come out at the same time, but compare and contrast the two latest Heath Ledger movies I shall. Brokeback Mountain is a drama, even a tragedy, about two homosexual lovers that shows how secret affairs can inflame jealousy and destroy families. Casanova is a comedy about one of the most famous heterosexual lovers of all time, and it gleefully mocks the Catholic Church while celebrating the liberating power of brothels and the like. The former film, which shows some of the negative effects of sexual immorality, has provoked outrage among some Christians. But will the latter, also depicting illicit sex, prompt the same response?

Not that outrage would be a proper response. On closer examination, it turns out there is more to Casanova than a celebration of promiscuity—though there isn't less. Giacomo Casanova (Ledger) is a notorious libertine who lives in Venice and, in one early scene, flees a convent full of admiring nuns because officers from the Inquisition have come to arrest him. "Eternal damnation for one night with Casanova," says one official to a novice when he finds evidence that Casanova has been in her chamber. "Seems fair," she shrugs.

Heath Ledger as the legendary lover Giacomo Casanova

Thanks to the intervention of the Doge (Tim McInnerney), or local magistrate, Casanova is spared a hanging, but the Doge tells Casanova he has become increasingly difficult to protect, so he can no longer stay in Venice—unless he marries and becomes a respectable citizen. Oh, and he has to do this before Carnivale, which takes place in just a few days. Casanova rises to the challenge and soon seems to be well on the way to beating this arbitrary deadline; he visits the pious Signor Donato (Stephen Greif) and asks for the hand of his daughter Victoria (Natalie Dormer), and since she is a frustrated virgin who really, really, really wants to have sex—she's so full of pent-up energy, objects shatter in her hands—she persuades her father to allow her to be betrothed to Casanova.

But then, through a complex set of circumstances I won't bother to get into here, Casanova meets Francesca Bruni (Alfie's Sienna Miller), a smart feminist centuries ahead of her time, who mistakes Casanova for another man and tells him how much she loathes men who sleep around and the women who think so little of themselves that they let themselves be used by such men. Casanova is intrigued, even smitten, by her fierce independence, and so he begins to track down whatever information he can find about her, and to woo her in a way that she might like—though his efforts seem to backfire, at least at first.

Sienna Miller plays Francesca Bruni, the only woman ever to refuse Casanova's charms

And so, this is the story of a promiscuous man who falls in love with a woman—precisely because of her insistence that promiscuity is a negative thing—and thus implicitly commits himself to her. Thus, for all its bucking of traditional morality, the film is actually quite conventional, at its narrative core. Occasionally, the characters walk past plays or puppet shows that have bawdy fun with the Casanova legend, and the film itself has that same don't-take-it-too-seriously feel. For the most part, this film supports the idea that a happy ending is one in which a man and a woman come together in a partnership for life.

Things are complicated even further when it is revealed that Francesca herself has a fiancé, though she has never met him; her father arranged the marriage before he died, and now Lord Papprizzio (Oliver Platt), a rotund lard merchant, is coming to Venice to claim his bride and to save the Bruni family from financial distress. Casanova intercepts him at the dock and takes him to his apartment before Papprizzio has had a chance to see Francesca for himself; at first, Papprizzio seems like little more than a fat fool, just another of the figures held up for our ridicule, though Platt soon allows us to see his sympathetic side. What follows is a complicated series of farcical plot twists and assumed and mistaken identities, and it's all fairly entertaining, even if there are some plot holes here and there.

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