The encounter between two legendary European cultural icons – Casanova and Count Dracula – is a confrontation between 18th-century Rationalism and 19th-century Romanticism, between unbridled intellectual hedonism and the dark attractiveness of bloodthirstiness; it is a clash between control and surrender, between profanity and holiness. In Albert Serra’s eccentric costume drama with a cast of non-professional actors, we see Casanova take on a new servant in Switzerland and leave for a primitive idyllic village ‘south of the Carpathians’. In his typical, idiosyncratic manner, Serra introduced the concept of ‘unfuckable’: not only as a critical illustration of his creative process, but also to describe the final product. You can embrace the film or reject it, but the painterly film itself remains what it is; as if it were the result of the same process of alchemy seen in the film: creating gold from excrement. Winner of the Golden Leopard in Locarno.
