‘CASANOVA’S’ BRILLIANT RESTORATION

The restoration of the 1927 French silent film “Casanova” was hailed as a major cinematic event when it was screened by the Cinematheque Francaise and the UCLA Film Archive in January, 1986, accompanied by a new score composed by Academy Award-winner Georges Delerue. This restored version of “Casanova” will be shown at 8 p.m. Monday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa, and again Delerue will conduct an ensemble of 15 musicians, but this time the players will be drawn from the Pacific Symphony. What follows are Times Music Critic Martin Bernheimer’s review of the UCLA performance and excerpts from an interview of Delerue by Steven Smith. Both pieces ran in Calendar.

In 1927, an inspired group of Russian expatriates in France made a preposterously ambitious, dazzlingly ambiguous, mildly risque, overwhelmingly stylish silent film called “Casanova.”

It was imaginatively directed--with operatic generosity, balletic splendor and pervasive whimsy--by Alexander Volkoff. It served primarily as a vehicle for Ivan Mosjoukine--a.k.a. Mozhukhin and/or Mosjukine--an enigmatic and apparently charismatic idol of czarist-era films who graced the Gallic cinema after the Bolshevik revolution. Mosjoukine died in poverty, incidentally, a dozen years after “Casanova,” a victim of the talking-picture revolution.

America saw “Casanova” briefly in 1931 in a mutilated and distorted version retitled “Prince of Adventure.” It insulted its creators. Thereafter, the film sank into a half-century of neglectful slumber, to be awakened only by the tender restorative kiss of the Cinematheque Francaise. (On Jan. 22, 1986 at Royce Hall, UCLA presented the world premiere of the restructured masterpiece.)

Some scenes have been exquisitely tinted; Technicolor be damned. The 35-millimeter print assembled here looks amazingly pristine. English “intertitles” nudge the obvious narrative along--just as similar devices tend to do, these days, at the opera. Perhaps best of all, an ensemble of live, breathing musicians accompanies the flickers with a delightful, historically apt and dramatically sensitive new score by Georges Delerue.

Delerue, you may recall, is a former pupil of Milhaud and a composer of some distinguished orchestral works and ballets, not just the celebrated sound-track collaborator of such directors as Malle, Godard, Truffaut, De Broca, Zinnemann, Huston, Bertolucci and Ken Russell.

No one seems to know anymore what sort of music accompanied the original “Casanova.” The 1927 version may have supported the somber elements in the film more effectively than Delerue cares to do. One suspects, however, that audiences in Paris 58 years ago heard a collage of recycled gut-response cliches.

Delerue tries harder. He reinforces the tone and the dynamic of virtually every scene with carefully synchronized affect. He provides a stylized sound effect, where needed. Most of the time, however, he rolls out a cleverly durchkomponiert musical carpet that fuses Leitmotivic themes, overt theatrical rhetoric and satirical nuances with a suite of undanced dances and unsung arias.

The tone remains light--French to the core--even when the accents remind the viewer that the locale in question happens to be Venice or St. Petersburg. Essentially, Delerue has created a sweet ballet bouffe , harmonically spiced with a few progressive surprises and texturally enriched with the discreet use, here and there, of an electronic keyboard. Richard Stone is credited with the arrangements.

At the accident-prone dress rehearsal (in Jan. 1986), Delerue himself coaxed a generally elegant performance from his 15-piece orchestra.

The score, like the film itself, is chronically episodic. It twirls with the inventive cameras at the Carnival of Venice. It glides delicately through the Russian snowscapes. It mirrors Mosjoukine’s exotic impersonation of the world’s most virtuosic seducer as he assumes the guise of magician, courtier, rogue, jester, acrobat, temporary repentant and ultimate swashbuckler.

Although Mosjoukine’s delicately painted visage and endlessly soulful gaze dominate the screen, one can be beguiled by the extravagant performances of the various women he quickly wins and, ironically, just as quickly loses.

Most notable are Suzanne Bianchetti as the vulnerable Catherine II of Russia, Jenny Jugo as the almost-innocent Therese, Rina de Liguro as the racy Corticelli and Diana Karenne as the sacrificial Maria Mari (in this edition she ends up in a convent; in others she pays for her illicit love with her life). Unless I am mistaken, it is none other than the great soprano Nina Koshetz (here called Kochitz) who appears briefly as the comic paramour of the Russian emperor.

The film is ornamented, in the best sense, by at least one erotic dance sequence of stunning, vaguely symbolic, charmingly prim understatement. Moreover, Lochakoff’s fabled sets, Boris Bilinsky’s ornate costumes and the authentic Venetian locations convey an aura of opulent indulgence untarnished by the passage of time.

“Casanova” is a brilliant achievement, brilliantly revitalized.