VAPID IN VENICE

REVIEWED - CASANOVA: CASANOVA climbs into a gondola and travels to the crumbling pile where the Inquisition's representative in Venice broods. The great lover gets out of the gondola, ascends a staircase and is told that, having been identified as a priapic menace, he must marry or face execution. He gets back in his gondola.

Elsewhere in the city, an unattractive lard merchant points his gondola towards the home of Francesca, the beautiful fiancee he is yet to meet. She, it transpires, has been up to no good. Some days she takes her gondola (she gets in, then, later, gets out again) to the university where she pretends to be a fusty academic; on other occasions she takes her gondola (you can see where we're going here) to fields at dawn where, features concealed by a mask, she fights duels.

Eventually, though Casanova has become engaged to a pale virgin and Francesca remains attached to the cooking-fat salesman, the two busy mariners end up in the same gondola. Many identities will be mistaken before they can sail it towards the sunset.

Yes, yes, Lasse Hallström, we get it.

Casanova was filmed on location. If all those gondola sequences - a little exaggerated in the summary above, I confess - don't communicate that fact, then the endless rooftop chases, frolics in piazzas and trysts on balconies surely will. All these embellishments are very pretty, but they slow the action down to a fatal crawl. This Casanova, with its galloping misunderstandings and frenzied concealments, aspires to be read as farce. Sadly the pace, despite the sickening overabundance of pummelled harpsichords and sawed cellos on the soundtrack, is closer to that of a requiem mass staged by Andrei Tarkovsky.

Some of the supporting players do manage to impose some vigour upon proceedings. Oliver Platt, always good, but seldom better than here, turns Francesca's suitor into an overpoweringly oily, though still somewhat likeable, buffoon, and Jeremy Irons, who is never knowingly out-hammed, has great fun making a panto villain of the Inquisition's bruiser-in-chief.

And the leads? Well, Heath Ledger proved in A Knight's Tale that he understands how to tumble through a period romp, but, puzzlingly, he has here decided to exhibit the stoicism he perfected for Brokeback Mountain. Still, even though every part of his face above the upper lip appears paralysed, he continues to radiate charm.

Sienna Miller, whose ghostly near-presence chills Francesca, is a different matter. For some reason, this unremarkable person - who, my advisors tell me, advanced the cause of something called boho chic - has been identified as an icon by middle-market women's magazines. So vague and indistinct is Miller's persona that it has the effect of inducing some of the symptoms recounted in Oliver Sacks's study of mental aberration, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Each time she withdrew from the screen I completely forget what she looked like and, confused and disoriented, had to reacquaint myself with her when she reappeared.

Hang on. Who are we talking about again?