Dernier amour (2019)
Directed by Benoît Jacquot

Film Review

The complexity and destructive power of romantic desire is a subject that has always fascinated Benoît Jacquot, to the extent that it forms the defining central strand of his oeuvre.  In Dernier amour, he presents an episode in the life of the celebrated Italian libertine Giacomo Casanova which illustrates how potent a force love can be when it takes root, driving even the world's most famous exponent of free love to the limits of distraction.  With the help of his co-screenwriter Chantal Thomas (with whom he collaborated to great acclaim on another grand period piece Les Adieux à la reine), Jacquot forces us to regard Casanova from a fresh perspective and see a little more of the man and less of the myth that cinema has so far dwelt on.

For Jacquot, Vincent Lindon was the natural choice for the part of the great lover.  The actor and director had worked together on four films prior to this, their mostly recent collaboration being another period romantic drama, Journal d'une femme de chambre (2015).  A charismatic performer who is frequently lauded for the intensity and depth he brings to his portrayals of inwardly warped and tormented individuals, Lindon is well-suited to play the middle-aged Casanova as he succumbs to the most harrowing romantic ordeal of his entire life.  The actor's penchant for tortured introspection makes him ideally suited for Jacquot's pared back, dialogue-sparse brand of cinema, and his performance in Dernier amour must surely rate as one his most poignant. Lindon's bitterly conflicted Casanova could not be further from the shameless brute portrayed by Donald Sutherland in Fellini's famous 1976 magnum opus.

With her stunning good looks and brazen vitality, Stacy Martin is equally well chosen for the part of the calculating miss who skewers the heart of Casanova with an almost fiendish relish, Marianne de Charpillon.  Having shown her worth in Michel Hazanavicius's Redoutable (2017), Martin uses her obvious feminine charms to deadly effect in Jacquot's film, although her character remains frustratingly opaque throughout and ends up pretty much as the archetypal unattainable object of desire.  This may be a fault of the screenwriting or it may be intentional - after all, we are not seeing the manipulative courtesan as she was in real life, but as Casanova remembers her in his declining years, a female version of himself - the siren that all men desire but none can possess.

A deliberately understated and measured work, Dernier amour is not the kind of film that is likely to garner a wide audience.  Indeed, with its lethargic pace and obvious dearth of plot, it struggles to fill its 100 minute runtime and were it not for Lindon's committed performance the film's appeal would soon wear thin.  Increasingly, Jacquot seems to be showing a return to the minimalist Bressonian form of his earlier films, but in doing so he risks alienating many of those who have been won over by his singular style of cinema which has recently achieved a happy union of auteur rigour and mainstream appeal.  Crafted with more conscious thought than real passion, Dernier amour is less accessible than many of the films the director has offered us over the past decade or two, but it still has the power to move your heart.  This is an involving adult drama that succeeds in giving Casanova a new face through its carefully contrived marriage of intelligence and sentiment.

Film Synopsis

By 1785, Giacomo Casanova, once the world's most notorious libertine, is a morally and physically depleted sixty-year-old.  Impoverished and tired of life, he takes refuge in the Bohemian castle residence of Count Joseph Karl von Waldstein, to write his memoirs in which he recounts his colourful amorous exploits.  Visited by an attractive young woman, he recalls an episode in his life that still causes him anguish - for it was the first and only time that he truly lost his heart to a woman.  The story begins when Casanova, not yet forty, arrives in London.  Here, he encounters a 17-year-old courtesan named Marianne de Charpillon and immediately he senses that she is different from any other woman he has met.

Although she offers him little encouragement, the Venetian exile soon becomes hopelessly infatuated with the beguiling La Charpillon.  Such is his intensity of feeling for this divine creature that the great lover loses interest in all other members of her sex and thinks only of making her his next conquest.  But this is more than just the usual urge to gratify his lust.  Casanova has to admit that he is deeply and irretrievably in love.  Aware of the power that she now has over her infatuated admirer, La Charpillon torments him further by refusing to yield to his powers of seduction.  Only when she is convinced of Casanova's love for her will she surrender to him...