Casanova Movie ReviewsCasanova 'Casanova' StyleONE EVENING in November 1763 the splendidly named Sir Wellbore Ellis Agar passed a middle-aged Venetian man on Westminster Bridge who, he thought, aspected a little cheerless. Sir Wellbore knew what the stranger needed: ‘a drink, a woman, beef and Yorkshire pudding’.. And so he took the 38-long old Casanova to a tavern on Cockspur Roadway which supplied all these delights of British zip..
he was secure running out of money; yet again he had a dose of venereal disease; and his heart had been broken by a merciless Soho-based courtesan named Marie Anne Chaprillon.. He had professed love; she had taken his money, frustrated his wants, betrayed and humiliated him. On Westminster Bridge that night he had been - and not for the first stretch in his life - contemplating suicide. The English baronet saved his life, but not his amour propre.. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Casanova's night with Sir Wellbore was the indigence for intoxicated musicians. Men of their station and slant frequently did not have much of a sense of virginity when it came to such things and certainly no right to glimpse. Perhaps they would play better the less they saw.. Casanova's number of conquests was, if not small, not excessive either. What made him different from his libidinous contemporaries was that reason of method.. Born into an interim kinfolk, and animated among performers all his life, Casanova knew exactly how to play to an audience.. The great strength of Ian Kelly's new biography is that he emphasises this aspect of the old roué's character. Kelly is himself an actor, and he is attuned to the 18th-century habit of mind that zero in the subject as a stage. Casanova lived his vivaciousness as an actor. Neither born well nor with any inclination to requisition a stake in the sameness of authority existence, he made his way on his lucidnesss. Kelly moreover dispatchs Lady's man's wanderlust at the heart of the story and as a way of explaining the man himself. He follows the wake his subject left in his eternal rovings round Europe.. "What was required of me," wrote Casanova of his proceeds as sometime trainee priest, warrior, violinist, quack, cabbalist professional, lottery promoter, entrepreneur and spy, "was the skill to play my role and not to compromise myself. The specialty is to dazzle." After his beloved but unforgiving Venice he felt extremely at ease (he never felt at home anywhere) in Paris. As such he was considered a dangerous revolutionist by the Inquisitori di Stato, the patricians who oversaw the security of the republic.. Worse than joining his fellows in seduc ing high-born nuns and responsive heiresses, he played upon a supposed penetration into astrology and the cabbala to dazzle his noble acquaintances.. Kelly's account is pleasing reading for it is more than a breezeless value of gallantry. A glut of Mills and Boon-style details of amatory hazards would leave the reader with indigestion. For Casanova, sexual conquest on its own was never competent. In his memoirs, erotic exploits lead typically to reflections on philosophy, literature and history. It was all part of liveliness; and for leader as intellectually curious as Casanova, sex was part of the reconnaissance of the human condition and the quintessence upon which literature fed. On his journeys he met and held his own with the likes of Voltaire, Franklin, Frederick the Great, Catherine the Healthy, Mozart and Dr Johnson. Casanova was a man of omnivorous tastes - in matters of hetero- and lesbian love, but further in learning, food and money-making. All had to be approached with style - and if they could be somehow combined so much the better.. By re-examining Womanizer's life in this way Kelly has scriptural an adult book. There are no superbs of corsets here or purple passages (although there are salacious incidents). Kelly has made good use of repositories round Europe to fill in the details, corroborate or correct Casanova's much wondered memoirs; it is impressive solve.
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