Casanova’s First Love
TORONTO – Few historical figures have received the silver screen treatment, and those few tend to be depicted ad nauseum. In part, because the film industry [especially Hollywood] loves a sure bet. But film Producers can always bet the bank on the salacious lives of history’s scofflaws, scoundrels and con artists. Enter Giacomo Casanova, an 18th century Venetian writer and “adventurer”. To date, his story has been adapted to screen almost a dozen times, from a Hungarian silent film in 1918 to Michiel Van Erp’s most recent attempt, titled A Beautiful Imperfection.
In theatres on August 21st, A Beautiful Imperfection recounts the story of Casanova’s first love. Taken from Arthur Japin’s 2003 novel “In Lucia’s Eyes”, the film chronicles the life of one of the two women that Casanova believed “he had wronged” – according to his memoir. But while Casanova describes his life’s exploits through 12 volumes and nearly 4000 pages, Japin’s novel and Van Erp’s film chose to tell the tale through Lucia’s perspective.
Like Casanova’s own memoir, the film straddles between fact and fiction as it unspools the 18 years between their first encounter and their reunion. Casanova tells us in his autobiography, that as a teenager he spent some weeks in the Friulian countryside canoodling with an adolescent chambermaid named Lucia. Yet because of her innocence, he abstained from having sex with her. His guilt – of having “wronged her” – stemmed from having awoken her sexual desires without satisfying them.
As for the rest of the story, A Beautiful Imperfection slightly twists the narrative. Whereas Casanova explains that Lucia had eloped – presumably hysterical from his departure – with a courier just months after he’d left Friuli, the book and film challenge his account. In Japin’s tale, Lucia contracts smallpox which disfigures her face. She then concocts an elope story to spare Casanova from having to be with a sickly-looking woman – which would surely have hindered his ambitions for social climbing in Venice.
It may have been Japin’s desire to restore dignity to the real-life Lucia, given how Casanova unflatteringly described their reunion 18 years later: “Far more than age, debauchery had withered her face and all its appurtenances. Lucia, fond, pretty, ingenuous Lucia, whom I had loved so much and whom I had spared out of delicacy, in such a state, ugly, repellent, in a brothel in Amsterdam!”
The film essentially picks up from their reunion as Casanova encounters Lucia as a masked courtesan in an Amsterdam brothel.
As he begins courting the mysterious woman, Lucia struggles with unveiling her face and true identity, unsure if it will repel him or not. A Beautiful Imperfection may present as a tale of star-crossed lovers, but more than that, it’s a story about metamorphosis and rising above one’s circumstance.
Filmed in evocative locations between Venice, Vicenza, Padua, and Amsterdam, A Beautiful Imperfection will reach Italian Cinemas on August 21st and is currently on Amazon Prime Video in the U.S.
(Images courtesy of Kaap Holland Film, Kino Produzioni, Eyeworks Film & TV Drama)
Massimo Volpe is a filmmaker and freelance writer from Toronto: he writes reviews of Italian films/content on Netflix
