I will begin by saying this is not the worst Lasse Hallström movie. I despise Chocolat for being over-precious and false, and The Cider House Rules ain’t really much better. In retrospect, and in the context of his English-language films, even his best film, My Life as a Dog, is more saccharine than it is, uh, splenda. Hallström seems to specialize in pleasing Miramax’s core crowd (when there was a Miramax) — i.e., the middlest of the middlebrow.

A digression: There’s a roving pack of old ladies who seem to be at every Ritz (i.e., Philly arthouse) movie I see. They explain plot points to each other as those points occur, and they all seem to really want to Get what the characters are experiencing and Feel Deeply when it turns out that the transvestite with the heart murmur (Philip Seymour Hoffman) has only ever wanted to be loved, and to enter the Iditarod. The old ladies, for some reason, are all named Sylvia.

Anyway, needless to say, Sylvia loves Lasse Hallström movies.

I’m sure they love Casanova, too. It’s historicoliterary; it’s set in a ravishingly beautiful, highly sanitized and sanitary 18th-century Venice (you’d even bet the city didn’t stink to high heaven if you didn’t know better); it stars that hunky Heath Ledger; Jeremy Irons is the bad guy; and it’s a bawdy sex farce with absolutely zero bawd or sex.

There seems to be a conscious effort to make Shakespeare in Love (a Miramax ‘n’ Sylvia movie that I happen to adore), only a century later. There are quite a few Shakespearisms (lots of confused identities and doubling, a Portia-like woman playing at barrister), and I even believe that Tom Stoppard did a script polish. The thing is, Casanova is not nearly as smart. There is a masked ball scene with Casanova juggling his two fiancées (yes, this Casanova has fiancées), that gets its timing and comic sensibilities from the “Brady Bunch” episode where Peter has two simultaneous dates.

To further praise with faint damnation, on the way home Patrick R. and I devised an elaborate mapping between Casanova and the 18th-century installment of the Police Academy films that they never got around to making. It is totally easy to imagine Steve Guttenberg as Cadet Giacomo Casanova, Kim Cattrall as Cadet Francesca Bruni, Jeremy Irons as Lt. Harris, The Doge as Commandant Lassard, and, uh, Bubba Smith as Hightower.

Admittedly, the analogy, like the movie, is an amusing mess.