Back to Back 40 - Rapscallions, Rogues, Reprobates... and Redemption Run Awry

Contrasting two picaresque epics of 18th century alpha bois

Barry Lyndon (1975) - writer/director Stanley Kubrick
Fellini’s Casanova (1976) - co-writer/director Federico Fellini, co-writer Bernardino Zapponi

Genre: Picaresque adventures - picturesque (Kubrick); grandiose and squalid (Fellini)

Three widely-differing historical individuals are suggested as having contributed to the composite portrait [of Barry Lyndon]. Best known of these was that very prince among adventurers, G. J. Casanova de Seingalt, a man who in the latter half of the eighteenth century played the part of adventurer... His autobiography, Memoires écrits por lui-même, has been described as ‘unmatched as a self-revelation of scoundrelism.’
William M. Thackeray, Barry Lyndon ‘Biographical Note' (1844)

The Rogue Army is coming - hide your jewels, your family heirlooms, and above all hide those vulnerable young women in your family that might be swayed by a handsome face, or even the face of Donald Sutherland with his forehead shaved right back.

It’s time to dive into the picaresque, the genre of story which follows that rogue as he traipses around seeking his fortune and getting into scrapes. The picaresque is all about the pícaro, the trickster moving from place to place in search of the perfect mark.

The trickster is the quintessence of opportunism, personal will to survive and mock-heroic hedonism… being compulsive vagabonds in search of new encounters, rogues have to merge with the outside world; they have to renounce their solitude and act like social animals in order to ensnare their prey.
Luigi Gussago, Picaresque Fiction Today: The Trickster in Contemporary Fiction (2016) p.248

First we have a neglected classic of Stanley Kubrick, and then a neglected classic of Federico Fellini. It seems that in the 1970s people - or at least the moralistic tribe of scribblers called film critics - turned against the amoral trickster and consigned him to oblivion. He could be resuscitated later as an Indiana Jones, but you’d need a certain something by way of Harrison Ford, plus a whole lot of entertaining action. These films built up a reputation for being a tiresome snooze (Kubrick) and a disgusting festival of ghastly sex scenes (Fellini), reputations which were wholly undeserved - well, at least the tiresome snooze, anyway.

Barry Lyndon, the only one of Kubrick's films to be so severely underrated, is paradoxically also the originator of the subgenre of picturesque historical dramas that are so successful today. It’s a genre instigator, with its unhurried widescreen panoramas of landscapes, painstakingly authentic recreations of setting and costume, and detached and ironic treatment of character. Comparing it with Tom Jones (1963), we see that though the natural beauty and the costumes of 18th century are present in the earlier film, it is filmed in a homely style typical of British post-war cinema. It is lacking the grandeur, or you might say hauteur, of Kubrick's measured approach. 

To a great extent, some or all of these elements of Barry Lyndon would be present in many of the historical dramas filmed since. Ridley Scott was influenced to make his debut film The Duellists (1977) in its image, and it remains among Scott's most accomplished films in terms of sheer sensuous gorgeousness, with the exception of some scenes in Thelma and Louise (1991), and of course Blade Runner (1982). 

Even in his much later woeful effort Napoleon (2023), Scott has a scene steeped in the lush candlelight of the Kubrick film, and the rich authenticity of the costume and setting surely follows the influence of Lyndon. Jane Austen adaptations like Pride and Prejudice (2005) and even Emma (2020) follow a similar cinematographic style, though with a much more intimate approach to character. Lanthimos's The Favourite (2018) also bears the mark of Kubrick's film in its framing of interior scenes and emphasis on costume as an aspect of (ironically detached) character. Even Twelve Years a Slave (2013) could be said to have some of Barry's DNA, despite its very different subject matter and tone. 

So for all this huge influence it might come as a surprise to learn that Barry Lyndon did only modest business at the box office and was generally slated by critics and public alike for its slow pace and cold demeanour. One critic called it "the motion picture equivalent of one of those very large, very heavy, very expensive, very elegant and very dull books that exist solely to be seen on coffee tables. It is ravishingly beautiful and incredibly tedious in about equal doses."

Pauline Kael chimed in on the same theme, with her typical unsympathetic hauteur for everything that didn’t interest her personally: "It's a coffee-table movie; we might as well be at a three-hour slide show for art-history majors." The arrogance of suggesting that only ‘art-history majors’ could be interested in sumptous imagery aside, Ms Kael fails to see that there is a very real human story of passion involved here. Maybe she’d drifted off into a drunken slumber before that became obvious in the second part.

But I believe we can take it off the coffee table and treat it more like the text it is based on, W.M. Thackeray's The Luck of Barry Lyndon (1844): a dry, ironic and bittersweet tragicomedy with satirical touches and a picaresque (non)structure. We could even take the way it treats the Irishness of Barry and his family, as well as the Chevalier de Bali-Bari, as an incisive commentary on British colonialism and English haughtiness. All the Irish characters in the film (except Barry himself) are witty and warm, even when robbing the hero at gunpoint; all the English characters are stiff and snobbish, even the hilariously on-edge Captain Quinn (Leonard Rossiter). 

And the coldness that some complain about doesn't really kick in until the second part of the film. We could compare the charged eroticism of Barry's early encounter with Cousin Nora (Gay Hamilton) with the stillness of his later candlelight meeting with Lady Lyndon (Marisa Benson). Both scenes make use of slow action to tease the viewer with the frustrated desire that Barry experiences, but the later scene is much more restrained, with no physical action and only the intensity of the glances to do all the erotic work. 

It doesn't even hurt the film that Ryan O'Neal as Redmond Barry isn't a very good actor, and that his attempt at an Irish accent is barely convincing. Kubrick used O'Neal for what he could give, being a practised performer in romantic dramas and comedies, as basically a model, to stand in the right position, say the lines and perform the actions. It suited his purpose that the actor was a tiresome nullity with nothing but good looks and ambition to him, as he wished to make the story of exactly such a nullity grown great through ambition and the downfall that followed. Ironically for O'Neal, this film would be exactly that downfall for him.

— INTERMISSION —

[Casanova is] an Italian, the Italian, the indefiniteness, the indifference, the commonplaces, the conventional ways, the façade, the figure, the attitude. And therefore it is clear why he has become a myth, because really he is a nothingness, a universality without meaning.
Fellini on Giacomo Casanova, interview with Aldo Tassone, in Peter Bondonella (ed), Federico Fellini: Essays in Criticism (1978) p.30

After Fellini's Satyricon (1969), or more correctly Fellini Satyricon, came the film which most echoes that style, Fellini's Casanova. It's fair to say that in this period Fellini got a kick of putting his own name on the title - there's also Fellini's Roma just between them in 1972 - and in making the mise-en-scène extremely theatrical and artificial (remember the plastic sea in 1973's Amarcord? Here it's back in spades with a black polythene sea that resembles nothing more than a giant bin bag.

It's a sobering thought that in 1977, when this film was released, I was to thrill at Lucas's Star Wars and Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I imagine that if the 12-year-old-me had seen a clammy Donald Sutherland in makeup like a sixpenny whore schtupping a guffawing nun in red lingerie while being watched by a man in a fisheye, or reluctantly servicing a geriatric heiress desiring to breed the immortal child, or taking pleasure in a mechanical sex-doll, my life would have been quite different. Possibly I would never have had sex at all, or else tried to have it at every moment of my waking life after swallowing 19 eggs in a rum punch. Quite different.

It would be impossible to sum up the experience of this film in one word. You would always need at least two. Grandiose and squalid. Magnificent and tawdry. Alluring and gross. Masterful and botched. Spectacular and vile. So it is that, just like Imperial Rome in the Satyricon, Casanova's Europe, and the pícaro rapscallion that is Casanova himself, get to be placed in that ambivalent space that everything Fellini touched would occupy - beautiful and grotesque at once, full of vitality and touched by the melancholy of mortality.

Fellini started out by hating Casanova completely and utterly, and in interviews before the project began he would hammer home his absolute contempt for the man and his place as the most typical Empty man Italian of all time:

I want to unmask him. He is the eternal boy who never grows up. To me Casanova is the typical immature Italian, the Papagallo, the heartbreaker, the women’s idol, but in reality a mother’s boy who rejects all responsibility and who lives in the pleasant illusion that everything comes from above; from Mama, from the King, from the Duce, from the Madonna. A man who is the prisoner of his own myths, including the one of being a heartbreaker... a dull writer, a trouble-maker, a braggart, an arsehole, a megalomaniac, a Fascist, a lover with ice-cold sperm, a human piston, a jumping jack, a provincial playboy, a blockhead.
Fellini on Giacomo Casanova in Francesco Tornabene, Fellini: The Fantastic Visions of a Realist (1990) p.103

There is a lot of what is vile and contemptible in the Casanova of the film. But it's also clear from the protagonist's portrayal that the situation is a lot more complex than that. His dignity when faced with all the scorn coming from the young people when he recites his poetry, just before the end, is nothing other than heroic.

The “Clockwork Automaton Scene” - one of the most influential scenes in modern film history?
(Looking at Yorgos Lanthimos and Ari Aster for a response, here)

His dream, in which fragments of his life drift through a remembered nostalgic Venetian dreamscape and ends with a tender dance with the automaton-woman he'd used so casually as a sex-toy, is touching as well as ironic and funny (the reappearance of the 'mad-lad' Pope is particularly hilarious).

Yet if we compare with the famous dream-sequence in 8 1⁄2 (1963) we note that this closing dream, though fitting and wistful, as well as rounding out the narrative by returning to a barren waterless dream-version of the Venice bridges of the first scene, lacks the sheer power and impact of the earlier film. When Guido confronted his parents in the land of the dead, it was both touching and deeply eerie. Here the dream ending is effective but nowhere near as powerful.

The performance by Donald Sutherland is wonderful, a career best in a fine career. The music by Nino Rota is perhaps the absolute high point of the movie, as by now maestro Rota was bringing his best game to every single Fellini project. And the whole staging and costuming of the scenes is exquisite, like the incredible compositions in Satyricon and Amarcord, rich in colour and detail. The placement of symbolic objects, like Casanova's ubiquitous mechanical owl that is both his eternal burden and his powerful phallus (it is of course ragged and wrecked in those melancholy last scenes), is the culmination of Fellini's method of seeking objects to represent both concepts and emotions.

Both the film and the protagonist have been interpreted as a "decomposing national phallus" but there is just as much sadness as anger in that conception of the story. Fellini himself, for all the hostility he expressed towards Casanova as a historical figure and symbol of the ultimate Italian manchild, also saw this film in elegaic terms, as the necessary funeral of a particular type of character that he would no longer be:

After this film, the moody and unreliable part of me, the undecided part of me that was constantly seduced by compromise — the part of me that didn’t want to grow up — had to die. For me the film meant crossing the line, gliding into the last part of my life.
Francesco Tornabene, Fellini: The Fantastic Visions of a Realist (1990) p.105

So the Casanova that twirls away in the arms of his fantasy mechanical sex-doll was the immature Fellini, full of his trademark "voluptuous openness". The remaining work in his life would be made with the consciousness that he was now "in the last part of [his] life" and attempting to memorialize more than effusively celebrate it.

Maybe that's why the 'mad lad' Pope, so much like a rockstar in his gaudy gold coach, waves goodbye before he drives away. But whatever else happens, the newly-matured and death-ready Fellini/Casanova will always hold dear the memory of that triumphal apotheosis after the sex contest in Rome, or the orgy in the inn with hunchback and the huge-breasted lady in Dresden. Moments that can never die.