Loving Dangerously

Casanova-'70 is a marathon farce about impotence and fetishism, clumsily contrived to challenge the artistry of Marcello Mastroianni, who manages to outrun his vehicle at nearly every turn. As an Italian army major rather loosely attached to NATO, Mastroianni embarks on a series of amorous bivouacs, only to find that he cannot love unless his life is gravely threatened. He hungers for the romance, adventure and intrigue of yore, and Casanova argues that modern women cannot supply it.

Mastroianni's crisis begins with an Indonesian airline stewardess (Seyna Seyn). Lured to a hotel rendezvous between planes, the sylph announces at intervals that time is flying, finally swallows a tiny pill and phones downstairs to ask that the desk call back in exactly 38 minutes. Her cool acquiescence chills Mastroianni, and ultimately sends him to a sick psychiatrist whose advice is to love dangerously or not at all. Mastroianni's subsequent Misses and near-Misses include a lady lion tamer (Liana Orfei) who mixes her work with pleasure, an accursed village prostitute (Liana's cousin, Moira Orfei) whose customers tend to become accident prone, and a virginal golden beauty (Virna Lisi) who offers nothing more harrowing than a vow of chastity.

In the liveliest of the film's ten encounters, Director Mario Monicelli (Big Deal on Madonna Street, The Organizer) exuberantly parodies such earthy Sicilian comedies as Pietro Germi's Seduced and Abandoned. Posing as a doctor, Mastroianni offers his protection to a dishonored country girl (Yolanda Modio) and becomes so inflamed by the nearness of her murderous menfolk that he begins biting buttons off her dress. Another stylishly funny sequence, indebted to Fellini, drums up elegant corruption at a villa where a deaf aristocrat's mistress (Marisa Mell) tries to persuade Mastroianni to kill for her. In pursuit of the lady, he is ferried languidly along a stream, statues and bridges crumbling ominously in his wake.

As the bed-bored lover, Mastroianni is superb, now freezing almost imperceptibly over some affront to his fairly rigid erotic code, now quivering with gleeful, guilty passion as he catches a scent of danger. But his solid performance is wasted in fleshing out a hollow comic premise. In the end, Casanova collapses into palaver about murder and morals in a frantic courtroom scene--the customary last stop for a comedy that has lost its case.

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