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For those who haven't gone to see Casanova, I highly recommend it. It's like a Restoration drama made out of cotton candy, where each plot twist that unfolds makes the next plot twist as obvious and inevitable as an oncoming train, and then when it happens just as you predicted it, you're full of amused satisfaction. This is largely because the supporting actors (in particular the Lord High Inquisitor and the Unwanted Fiance who Made a Fortune in Pork Fat) are extremely talented, and because, like a fluffy AU slash fic, everybody ends up paired off with the appropriate person at the end, except for the bad guys, who shake their fists and rage impotently. Also, the costumes are very pretty. There could have been a bit more angst and, ideally, some torture scenes where Heath Ledger got to look beat up and pretty, but that probably wouldn't have meshed with the whole cotton candy aesthetic.
I'd put this movie in the same "historically inaccurate in a way you wish was true" catagory as Pirates of the Caribbean. Like PotC, it's set in an imaginary time period that apparently consists of the entire 17th and 18th centuries squished into a single decade, with all of the unpleasant bits left out. The main heroine is terribly anachronistic, of course (otherwise, she couldn't dress up as a man to fight a sword duel and look terribly cute in a tricorn hat), but the entire plot is such a tangle of unlikely mistaken/secret/assumed identities and massive coincidences that it works.
I was irritated that they had Anachonistic Scholarly Heroine inventing the hot air balloon in 1750s Venice when the first balloon flight was conducted in 1783 by two Frenchman, but I'm probably one of about twelve people who a) know that, and b) actually care.
I'd put this movie in the same "historically inaccurate in a way you wish was true" catagory as Pirates of the Caribbean. Like PotC, it's set in an imaginary time period that apparently consists of the entire 17th and 18th centuries squished into a single decade, with all of the unpleasant bits left out. The main heroine is terribly anachronistic, of course (otherwise, she couldn't dress up as a man to fight a sword duel and look terribly cute in a tricorn hat), but the entire plot is such a tangle of unlikely mistaken/secret/assumed identities and massive coincidences that it works.
I was irritated that they had Anachonistic Scholarly Heroine inventing the hot air balloon in 1750s Venice when the first balloon flight was conducted in 1783 by two Frenchman, but I'm probably one of about twelve people who a) know that, and b) actually care.
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Gina