‘Casanova’ seduces with a charming Ledger

Not since Nicole Kidman followed the Camille-like dance hall entertainer of “Moulin Rouge!” with “The Hours,” in which she portrayed Virginia Woolf, no less, has a star attempted such a stretch with such success as Heath Ledger, who has gone from playing a taciturn, tormented gay cowboy in “Brokeback Mountain” to the title role of Disney’s scintillating “Casanova” (which opens Sunday), the tireless 18th century seducer of countless beautiful women. Like Kidman, Ledger is equally engaging and convincing in both roles, and adds further testament to the charisma and protean talent and versatility of a roster of young Australian actors, which includes most notably Russell Crowe, who have risen to Hollywood’s highest ranks.

In essence, Lasse Hallstrom’s elegant, dizzying romantic comedy, written by various hands, suggests that life in Venice in the age of Casanova had become a full-time masquerade, in which sybaritic aristocrats are rarely what they seem. Nonstop intrigue and seduction amid the scheming and the ambitious pave the way for the film’s most amusing conceit: that the man who figures that the 10,000 pages of his manuscript equal the number of his sexual conquests is perhaps but myth and that he furthermore lost his heart to the one woman, the fiery proto-feminist Francesca (ravishing Sienna Miller), who did not automatically fall under his spell.

Francesca is the daughter of the elegant, witty but impoverished widow Andrea Bruni (a scene-stealing Lena Olin), who insists that her daughter be married off to a wealthy Genoese lard merchant (Oliver Platt, wonderfully droll) whose business is echoed all too obviously by his vast rotundity. Spurned, vengeful lovers thicken the plot, which comes to a head with the arrival of Bishop Pucci (Jeremy Irons), a Vatican inquisitor all set to tackle heresy and licentiousness with great, purse-lipped zeal.

Amid the baroque splendors of Venice, scheming and trickery escalate at a dizzying rate, and this effervescent film would burst like a soap bubble had Hallstrom not been able to maintain a lively pace and an irrepressible verve. Ironically, “Brokeback Mountain” and “Casanova,” so different in time, place, style and tone, actually connect on the important level of freedom of sexual expression. In the exhilarating “Casanova,” giddy shenanigans effectively set off the dangerous, darker impulses of human nature.

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‘Casanova’

MPAA rating: R for some sexual content

Times guidelines: Adult themes and situations

A Buena Vista Pictures release of a Touchstone Pictures presentation of a Mark Gordon Company-Hallstrom/Holleran production. Director Lasse Hallstrom, Producers Mark Gordon, Betsy Beers, Leslie Holleran. Executive producers Su Armstrong, Adam Merims, Gary Levinsohn. Cinematographer Oliver Stapleton. Editor Andrew Mondshein. Music Alexandre Desplat. Costumes Jenny Beavan. Production designer David Gropman. Art directors Alessandro Alberti, Dimitri Capuani, Massimo Pauletto. Set decorator Anna Pinnock. Running time: 1 hour, 52 minutes.

Opens Sunday in selected theaters.