Casanova Undressed (2016) - full transcript

Libertine, ruthless, insatiable.

Casanova is, for everyone,

the synonym of a playboy -

gluttonous and unscrupulous.

However,
this was not actually Casanova.

It's true that he was
a great seducer,

yet he was anything but perfunctory.

It's true that he was
a collector of adventures,

but not only amorous ones.

So then who was
Giacomo Casanova, really?

A relentless traveller.



A diplomat.

A religious man.

A musician.
A secret agent.

A mathematician. An alchemist.
An adventurer.

But, above all, a writer.

Casanova was a man of
a thousand faces,

a free man hungry for knowledge,
willing to risk his life

just to wear the many masks
his era offered him.

"I have always found delight in
losing the right path.

"I have constantly lived in
the midst of error,

"with no consolation but the
knowledge that I was mistaken.

"Therefore, dear reader,
I hope that far from finding

"in my history the character of
impudence and arrogance,

"you will find characteristics
of a general confession."



He left, at his death in 1798,
an extraordinary document,

the Histoire de ma vie,

The History Of My Life,

an attempt at an
encyclopaedic answer to

everything he could remember
of a long life well lived.

He wrote translations,
he wrote little poems,

he wrote plays,
and he wrote a fantastic novel,

a sort of 18th-century
science-fiction, L'Icosameron.

And yet those pages don't just
contain his numerous love affairs

but much, much more.

Casanova was a very modern man
in one particular regard -

he never had one single career,
it was a whole portfolio.

He trains for the priesthood,
he ends up a violinist,

a soldier, a traveller, an attempted
mathematician, a writer,

an organiser of the
state lottery in France,

and ends up as a librarian in
what was then known as Bohemia.

A man of many faces,

as many as are the masks of Venice.

His city.

One of the issues
that came to intrigue me,

partly because I'm an actor
as well as an historian,

is the issue of Giacomo Casanova
and mask and masquerade,

because the issue of the
fashionability of Venice is key to

understanding the 18th century, as
well as to understanding Casanova.

So on the one hand Venice is
the place of inquisition,

which means that it forbids you
from reading certain books,

anything that is too erotic or
that is too enlightened.

And so there is
this severity in Venice.

On the other hand,
it is also the place of liberty.

So we really have these
two facets of Venice embodied in

L'Histoire de ma vie.

To have a mask is to be invisible,
and therefore it means to be free.

Because a mask in Venice
is not just covering your eyes,

it's covering your entire body.

We don't know your name,
we don't know your gender,

we don't know who you are and you
can behave with complete freedom.

And that's what allows Casanova to
go from one street to the next

without ever being seen, jumping
from one gondola to the other,

to lose a spy, or somebody
who has been following him -

so it's really part of a big
hide and seek game for the

pleasure seekers and the free men
and women of 18th-century Venice.

"To be certain she could not
recognise me, I donned a mask,

"and without paying attention to
the cold - since a dress made

"of light calico is not particularly
agreeable - I boarded a gondola."

"I walked on, assuming the gait of
a booby, the true characteristic

"of my costume, and I entered
the circle of dancers.

"I stopped before a pretty girl
dressed as a harlequin

"and I took her hand in so awkward
a manner to dance with me a minuet."

Casanova's attraction for masks,

indeed his aptitude in
creating roles for himself,

did seem to narrate his story
from the very beginning.

His mother, Zanetta Farussi,
was an actress in an era

when to be so implied
a duality of career, and it is

unclear quite who the fathers of
his various siblings were.

One possibility is that his natural
father was of the Grimani family,

one of the grand patrician
families of Venice,

involved in the ownership of the
San Samuele Theatre.

And certainly Casanova seemed
to spend his life with this feeling

that he was born to do greater
things than was actually his lot

as the son of a
Venetian comedienne.

In 1741, at the age of just 16,

Casanova was conferred in
minor ecclesiastical orders

and achieved the title of abbe.

This allowed him a sort of entry
into Venetian society,

but also led to his meeting Angela,
the niece of the parish priest,

and it was this encounter with
Angela that began his travelogue

through the pleasures,
and indeed pain, of love.

My love for Angela proved
fatal to me

because from it sprang two other
love affairs which, in their turn,

brought with them a great many
others and forced me finally

to renounce the church
as a profession.

While still a teenager, Casanova
had been involved in numerous

sexual encounters and love affairs.

It was an adventurousness

that would accompany him
his entire life.

If his apparently unbridled
sexual activity was perhaps not

a rarity for men of his era,
it perhaps was for men who,

like him, had chosen
a vocation in the church.

It was a role which lasted
just long enough to entertain him,

it might seem, whilst he was
waiting for a finer role to play.

"I still remember with pleasure
that I was greatly appeased

"when I was able to comfortably
admire myself in a beautiful mirror.

"I saw myself as superb and made to
wear and honour the military

"uniform I had chosen for a
pleasant inspiration."

By his early teen...
late teens, early 20s,

he's already been through
the career of cleric,

in effect, a professional
gambler as he tried, soldier.

Ended up as a violinist.

You could argue Casanova was a man

blessed or cursed by many talents.

He is never able to quite settle
at anything, it would seem, but also

was able to turn his mind and his
skills to many different careers.

"Who was Henriette?

"Who was the woman
of whom I became master?

"It seemed to me impossible to be
the happy mortal who possessed her."

It seems maybe the question
why didn't Casanova ever marry

begs more of us than it does of him.

He was interested
in another game of love.

There is, in performance terms,
not necessarily an expectation

that a game of love will end
necessarily in marriage.

The game and the performance
is what it's all about.

That issue of falling in love with
somebody else who was in masquerade,

somebody else who was a performer,

somebody who was obliged to be
very alive always to the hidden

and the shown, tells us something
very fascinating, maybe,

about Casanova and his interest also

in the broken personalities
of performers, in

the business of hiding and showing,
to the business of masquerade.

MUSIC: Flower Duet by Leo Delibes

None more important, maybe,

or more instructive,
I would argue, of the man,

than a person who has come down to
us under the pseudonym of Bellino.

# Sur la rive en fleurs

# Riant au matin

# Viens, descendons ensemble... #

Bellino,
such was the name of the castrato.

My libertine nature caused me
to feel intense voluptuousness

in believing him to be of that sex
to which I wanted him to belong.

And everything made me think of
a beautiful woman rather than a boy.

I became thoroughly enamoured.

# Gagnons le bord

# Ou la source dort

# Et l'oiseau, l'oiseau chante... #

Bellino was masquerading
as a castrato.

Masquerading because
Bellino, in fact, was a woman.

She may well have been
Teresa Lanti or Landi,

who went on to a very successful
career as a soprano

and whose portrait hangs in
La Scala in Milan to this day.

But when he/she met
Giacomo Casanova,

he/she was obliged to dress
as a man in order to perform

in the papal territories where
women could not sing onstage.

# Les cygnes aux ailes de neige

# Allons cueillir les lotus bleus

# Oui, pres des cygnes
aux ailes de neige,

# Allons cueillir les lotus bleus

# Sous le dome epais

# Sous le blanc jasmin

# Viens, descendons

# Dons

# Ensemb...

# Ensemble. #

His movements, the expression
of his face, his gait, his walk,

his countenance, his voice, and
above all, my own instinct told me

that I could not possibly feel for
a castrato what I felt for Bellino.

When you read L'Histoire de Ma Vie,

the reason why it is such, perhaps,
the best book one can ever read,

it's because
you hear Casanova's voice,

you hear him seducing you, trying to
enthral you into his tale

and you discover for yourself
the talent of the storyteller.

So really, reading L'Histoire de Ma
Vie, it's like talking to the man.

Rumours began to circulate about

the unprecedented and strange social
ascendancy of Giacomo Casanova.

Word spread about his healing,
with resort to mysterious arts.

He began to win
unexpectedly at cards.

There were stories of his numerous
affairs with some married women.

And all this solicited the interest
of the Venetian Inquisition -

an all-powerful but
secretive ministry,

such as one might find
in a modern police state.

And it began to gather
information about him.

And eventually, in the July of 1755,

Giacomo Casanova was arrested
and taken to Il Piombi Prison.

The word "tribunal"
froze the blood in my heart

and merely the faculty of
passive obedience was left to me.

I will spare the reader
what the rage,

indignation and despair
made me say and think against

the gruesome and despotic measure
that had been taken towards me.

One of the more shocking aspects of
the story of Casanova's imprisonment

in Il Piombi, The Leads, the prison
of the Venetian Inquisition,

under the roof of the Doge's Palace,

is that Casanova didn't really
know why he was there.

The Inquisition had no need
or pressure to actually explain

to those who were arrested
what they were arrested for,

or indeed how long people
were being incarcerated, or why.

In the police report,
what is the problem?

It seems to be that
it is what Casanova was reading,

the fact that he was a man
of the Enlightenment.

When they arrested him,
they came looking for his books,

asking him if he was familiar
with this or that work

and mostly occult works, so things
that you would call witchcraft.

So Casanova was really interested
in everything that was connected

to science and therefore
that also led him to explore

a bit of alchemy
and a lot of occultism.

He had read a lot, all the books
about how to...about

the Philosopher's Stone, how to turn
metal into gold, that type of thing.

There was a craze for that
in the 18th century.

For a long time I have had in
my possession a numerical Kab-Eli,

through which I can arrive
at an answer in Arabic numerals

to any question that
I put in the same numerals.

But what's happened to him is that
people would rush to him

to get from him this comfort
that he could tell them

either where treasure was buried,
how to get to know the future

by interrogating his spirit,
his angel spirit,

or in the case of Madame d'Urfe,

so he says that some mad woman -
mad old woman he met in Paris -

she was very much into that,

she was completely into
what we would call witchcraft.

MUSIC: Minuetto by Luigi Boccherini

She asked him to resuscitate her
as a young baby boy.

I was the possessor,
in her estimation, not only of

the Philosopher's Stone, but also of

the power of speaking with the whole
host of elementary spirits,

from which premises she drew
the very logical deduction

that I could turn the world
upside down if I liked.

So Casanova really claims that
he's not an impostor, he's not

lying to people, he's giving them
really in fact just what they want.

He says, "I am not fooling them,
they're fools already

"and I'm just exploiting
their weakness,

"but not for my own benefit,
rather for them

"because it brings them a
bit of happiness, a bit of hope."

There is another reason as to why
Casanova was sent to prison

in Il Piombi, which might be

the fact that
he belonged to Freemasonry.

So at the time, of course,

everybody more or less powerful was
potentially connected to a lodge,

was a Masonic brother himself,
and it is very possible that it is

in fact personal, social rivalries
that put Casanova in prison

to get rid of him, put away from
that society which he was trying to,

on which he was trying to climb
more and more

and was doing so very successfully.

A well-born young man who wishes to
travel and know not only the world

but also what is called
good society,

who does not want to find himself in
certain cases inferior to his equals

and excluded from participating
in all their pleasures,

must get himself initiated
in what is called Freemasonry.

Giacomo Casanova was sentenced, for
his infractions, whatever they were,

to solitary confinement and
maybe to five years of a sentence.

I began to study a thousand ways
to carry through a venture that

many had attempted before me but
no-one had been able to complete.

After having surmounted 15 or 16
plates, I found myself on the ridge

of the roof, on which I sat astride,

comfortably, spreading out my legs.

My back was towards the little
island of St George the Greater

and about 200 paces in front of me
were the numerous cupolas

of St Mark's Church, which
forms part of the Ducal Palace.

He got onto the roof,

realised that at full moon
they might cast a shadow,

waited for the moon to pass,
or a cloud to pass over the moon,

got back down into the palace,
the Doge's Palace below.

Avoiding the appearance of
a fugitive, but walking fast,

I went down the splendid stairs
of the giant.

I went straight towards the chief
door of the palace and, looking at

no-one so that no-one might notice
me, I crossed the square, reached

the dock and then entered the first
gondola that I came across.

Casanova's escape from The Leads

was the turning point
of his entire life.

Venice repudiated him.
He is, most of his life after that,

in exile from Venice, but
the rest of Europe, the courts of

Europe in particular, embrace him
and allow him to reinvent himself.

This, um, story,
the Histoire de Ma Fuite,

as it later became known
when it was finally published,

was Casanova's only claim to fame,
really, in his own lifetime.

Literary fame eventually,
because it was a minor bestseller,

when eventually published.

Giacomo Casanova had a preposterous
and wonderful picaresque adventure

throughout all of
the then known world

as a result of being exiled,
in effect, from Venice.

Another fascinating aspect of
L'Histoire de Ma Vie

are what amounts to
celebrity pen sketches.

The great and the good of
his era that Casanova met,

from Catherine the Great
to Frederick the Great,

Voltaire, Rousseau, Crebillon,

Samuel Johnson, Benjamin Franklin.

Across Europe of this era, he seemed
to be bumping into everybody

in some Zelig or Forrest Gump sort
of manner. How is this possible?

When Casanova walks into a room,
already, you cannot miss him.

He's very tall, he's dark -
he has an aura.

When he walks into a room,
you can't miss it.

But more than that,
what he has is a real...

the talent of a showman.

And he has... Which...

Which means that when you
talk to him, he entertains you -

he seduces you.

He wanted to achieve the financial
and social prestige

and ascendancy that had been
denied him in Venice.

HE SPEAKS FRENCH

"For my demonstration,
just half an hour was required.

"The substance was that the lottery
would have been perfectly equal

"in relation to payment of the
winning ticket

"if instead of five numbers,
six were extracted.

"Yet, since five would be extracted,

"this offered assurance that there
would always be a profit of 20%."

In 1757, the French government
embraced Casanova's ideas

and instituted a national lottery
which he himself would promote.

It again demonstrates his
extraordinary ingenuity,

inventiveness, and for that matter
his intellectual skill,

in particular, in mathematics.

And he published a series of
articles on the subject,

including, for instance,
a number of essays on the issue of

the doubling of
the volume of a cube -

an issue that had excited the
interest of mathematicians

since antiquity.

"And not knowing the rules that
arithmetic prescribed for those

"who want to calculate to
provide certainties on all

"degrees of measure,
I doubled the cube numerically,

"significantly, practically,
as was desired,

"and that had been sought in vain
for 2,000 years."

Priest, soldier, adventurer,
alchemist, businessman,

mathematician.

In order to gain social ascendancy
and enter the social circles to

which he aspired, Casanova turned to
a whole dressing-up box of masks.

His role as adventurer was
the gift that kept on giving.

In 1766, he defied death
in a pistol duel

and this became the inspiration
for a minor, if celebrated,

literary success.

"Nothing more was said.

"With their weapons lowered,
looking each other in the face,

"both slowly retreated ten paces.

"The Venetian, who had already
raised his pistol but kept its

"muzzle pointing to the ground,

"turned sideways as if they were to
fight with swords."

MAN SPEAKS FRENCH

It was 1774 and Giacomo Casanova
finally received

a pardon from the
Venetian Inquisition.

After 18 years of exile,
Venice was again open to him.

MAN SPEAKS ITALIAN

"I was then 49 and I expected
no more of fortune's gifts,

"for the deity despises those of
a ripe age.

"I thought, however,

"that I might live comfortably
and independently in Venice.

"I had hoped to count on myself
drawing on my abilities."

The charges against him
were annulled.

However, and perhaps ironically,

he went into service for his
former persecutors,

the Venetian Inquisition, and donned
another mask as secret agent.

MAN SPEAKS ITALIAN

SHE SPEAKS ITALIAN

HE SPEAKS ITALIAN

WOMAN SPEAKS ITALIAN

HE SPEAKS FRENCH

HE SPEAKS ITALIAN

"The Protocosmos is a convex world,
and it is inhabited by

"extraordinary small creatures,
the Megamicres,

"great and spirit
and small in stature,

"on whose foreheads a cartilage
forms a sort of visor.

"In their world, the air is
completely different from in ours,

"and there is only one season.

"Night does not exist.

"The Megamicres do not sleep

"and their regime of living
never varies."

HE SPEAKS ITALIAN

HE SPEAKS FRENCH

SHE SPEAKS ITALIAN

MAN SPEAKS ITALIAN

FIREWORKS EXPLODE

MAN SPEAKS FRENCH

HE SPEAKS ITALIAN

HE SPEAKS FRENCH

CARRIAGE RUMBLES

In 1783, only nine years after his
return to Venice,

Giacomo Casanova was again
forced into exile.

"Or I am not made for Venice, I say,
or Venice is not for me.

"Or one or the other together.

"I have lived 58 years.

"I cannot go on foot with winter
at hand and when I think of

"starting on the road to resume my
adventurous life,

"I laugh at myself in the mirror."

SHE SPEAKS ITALIAN

So far from Venice and having
travelled so widely,

Casanova was forced, for the
first time, to stop completely.

WOMAN SPEAKS ITALIAN

HE SPEAKS ITALIAN

"I write," he wrote,
"otherwise I would be dead."

And in the silence of the
countryside, and indeed partly

as a cure for his melancholia,
he began obsessively writing.

HE SPEAKS ITALIAN

And as a result of that,

we have the extraordinary document
that is the "Histoire de ma vie".

"I have written the history of my
life and no-one can find fault

"with it, yet am I wise in
throwing it before a public?

"I am aware it is sheer folly,
but I want to keep myself busy.

"I want to laugh, so why should
I deny myself gratification?"

And maybe that's why that is his
most successful work,

because it was not something that he
tried to fake in order to

please an audience,
or in order to sell books.

This is actually his voice
that we hear.

It is him, himself, who he was,
speaking through the book.

HE SPEAKS ITALIAN

MUSIC: Serenade For Strings Op 22
by Antonin Dvorak

We see that he tries to preserve
suspense or mystery.

He really builds it as if it were
an adventure he did not know,

erm, he did not know....of which he
did not know the next episode.

And this sort of liberty
and invitation to the reader

to participate to the creation of
the final product of the book,

is very modern.

"The reader would discover in
these memoirs that, in life,

"I have never had a fixed aim
before my eyes,

"and that my system,
if it can be called a system,

"has been to let myself
be carried away,

"trusting to the wind where it led."

MAN SPEAKS FRENCH

HE SPEAKS ITALIAN

Casanova died in 1798
at the age of 73,

in the castle in Dux, or Duchcov,
in Bohemia,

where he had spent the last 15 years
of his life obsessively writing

the "Histoire de ma vie" -
the "History Of My Life".

"Death is a monster that turns away
from the great theatre an attentive

"spectator, before the end of
a play which deeply interests him."

When we read the memoirs we see,
maybe, a way to forget

about this looming death.

The memoirs are achieving eternity -
we can see that that may be

Casanova's little victory
over death.

So, he is not eternal,

alchemy and the philosopher's stone
has not achieved that,

but "l'Histoire de ma vie"
definitely has.

That is the thing that has allowed
Casanova to transgress the

last limit, which was the limit of
his human finitude.

Subtitles by Ericsson