Giacomo
Casanova and Don Giovanni were not the same, but it will become even easier to
confuse the two after this film. It is sort of a greatest hits package, combining
Casanova’s notorious memoirs with Mozart/Da Ponte arias from Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte, with John Malkovich basically reprising his work
from Dangerous Liaisons. He might be
the most meta actor ever, because he essentially plays himself, playing Casanova.
The confusion is the charm of Michael Sturminger’s adaptation of his operatic
mash-up, The Casanova Variations (trailer here), which releases today on VOD.
Don’t
let a little anachronism here and there throw you. Sturminger will freely
switch back and forth between an ostensibly realistic period production and a semi-traditional
opera staging, in which modern props and fourth-wall-breaking will often
intrude. It is hard to get our bearings in this meta-meta film and even harder
to keep them, so we cannot judge too harshly the doctor who rushes to the stage
to treat the apparently fallen (but really just acting) Malkovich. The stage
manager does not blame her either, but she will have to watch the rest of the
first act from the wings.
Meanwhile,
in Casanova’s life, Elisa von der Recke calls on the aging adventurer,
supposedly with a proposal from a publisher. He doesn’t believe her for one
minute, but there is no way he would ungallantly turn away a young lady. Her
interest in his life story is genuine, but clearly it is of a more personal nature,
rather than professional.
Variations has all the lush
costuming and trappings of high culture, but its gender-bending,
reality-problematizing narrative is uber-postmodern. Frankly, it is easy to
lose your place in the film, because Sturminger does not throw down enough
markers to clearly delineate each sphere. That can be baffling (and rather
maddening), but if you just let go and roll with it, Variations will start to come together as a whole.
As
you would hope and expect from a film starring Malkovich as Casanova (and as
himself, playing Casanova), Variations is
often quite witty. Of course, it sounds beautiful, since it cherry-picks the
most passionate Mozart arias. Malkovich’s singing voice is so dubious, it
becomes the subject of an extended in-joke, but fortunately for the audience,
professional baritone Florian Boesch serves as his alternate-alter-ego. Miah
Persson sort of serves the same function for Veronica Ferres’ von der Recke, while
most of the rest of the cast consists of legit opera singers, including Kerstin
Avemo and Kate Lindsey as Casanova’s former lovers and the great Barbara
Hannigan as a contemporary.