This is movie can be understood better by people over 60 years old. There are two narrative levels that intertwine and both pay homage to Federico Fellini. In the reality, Toni Servillo plays a director in crisis and full of doubts (shot in black and white just like Fellini's 81/2) who doesn't know how to finish editing the film version of Arthur Schnitzler's Return of Casanova played by a feminine Fabrizio Bentivoglio. In the fiction in which the director's life is reflected (this narrative level is in color like Fellini's Casanova) Casanova is going back to Venice and he has one last love affair. The director (Servillo) falls in love with Silvia, a seductive peasant girl he meets during filming, played by Sara Serraiocco.
Falling in love on the set happens often to many filmmakers and actors, but it takes on a particular color when you are a sixty-year-old director (or 70 or 80) looking for a last remnant of life and vitality as both the director and Casanova say.
Both find a moment of love, with a trick or charm. The director's affair also works because the girl doesn't reject the advances of the "old man", but rather falls in love with him so much that she gets pregnant with him. But he is too used to his solitude in his uselessly technological home to come out of his shell and change his life, so they break up.
The film that he edits after many difficulties will find its way and will go to the Venice Film Festival. At the bar the actor and director confess their passions for each other and movie making, then the director is left alone and while he is looking for Silvia, he finds her there, in the sea of the Lido and perhaps now that the film is over they will still be able to see a future together, even if as he said, when their son will be 7 years old he will be 70.
The film slips into some awkwardness and smudges, but has a sincere background and tells profound, painful and beautiful truths.
Falling in love on the set happens often to many filmmakers and actors, but it takes on a particular color when you are a sixty-year-old director (or 70 or 80) looking for a last remnant of life and vitality as both the director and Casanova say.
Both find a moment of love, with a trick or charm. The director's affair also works because the girl doesn't reject the advances of the "old man", but rather falls in love with him so much that she gets pregnant with him. But he is too used to his solitude in his uselessly technological home to come out of his shell and change his life, so they break up.
The film that he edits after many difficulties will find its way and will go to the Venice Film Festival. At the bar the actor and director confess their passions for each other and movie making, then the director is left alone and while he is looking for Silvia, he finds her there, in the sea of the Lido and perhaps now that the film is over they will still be able to see a future together, even if as he said, when their son will be 7 years old he will be 70.
The film slips into some awkwardness and smudges, but has a sincere background and tells profound, painful and beautiful truths.
