lovers and killers; A dazzling new Casanova delights Joan Juliet Buck and proves there's more than one way to tell an old story.(Movie review)

Byline: Joan Juliet Buck

Sydney Pollack, in his thoughtful documentary about Frank Gehry, quotes one of his teachers, who said, "Talent is liquefied trouble." By that measure, there's a lot of trouble on TV this month. Sketches of Frank Gehry (American Masters series, on PBS September 27) follows Ric Burns's four-hour Andy Warhol, a mammoth project about the strange Ruthenian from Pittsburgh who understood that America was ruled by fame, and whose art is still driving the point home. Narrated by Laurie Anderson, it features among other treasures unseen footage of Warhol shot in 1963 by the novelist James Salter when he was a CBS cameraman.

The great sweeping show of the month is the Casanova on Masterpiece Theatre; Casanovas of all kinds turn up with appalling frequency, but this one is terrific, with a wild Baz Luhrmann approach to costume drama. Peter O'Toole is the old librarian freezing in a Wurttemberg castle as he writes his memoirs, and David Tennant is Casanova as a young man making and having his way in Venice, Versailles, and London. Tennant looks nothing like O'Toole, and uses puppy charm where O'Toole would have done drop-dead beauty and sly grace, but Sheree Folkson directs the two-part saga, first seen last year in the U.K., in a dizzying jamboree of styles that may be the precursor to Sofia Coppola's way with the eighteenth century.

Casanova famously got women into bed by listening to them, and perhaps it takes a woman to make us listen to him. It may also take a woman to say to hell with Vivaldi and annoying minuets, and bring on a stunning sound track composed by Murray Gold that uses everything from ragtime to a recall of Nino Rota's haunting themes from Fellini's 1976 Casanova. Russell T. Davies has ironed out the Casanova story so that it is about his unrealized love for Henriette, the courtesan he meets when he arrives in Venice. As Henriette, Laura Fraser wears peculiar ribbon knots in her hair-think Galliano backstage, circa 1995, or Topsy-but she has intense dark eyes and a merry sense of complicity. Casanova improvises himself as a lawyer, a doctor, and an astrologer, pretends to be a spy, and invents the lottery in France. He also falls in love with Bellino, a woman passing as a castrato. Nina Sosanya plays her in male and female costume, with a nod to Cherubino and another to Dil, the Jaye Davidson character in The Crying Game. There's more emotion in this telefilm than in Fellini's dour version, and it's not always from love: At a ball, Casanova and Bellino shock Venetian society by wearing torn-up pieces of each other's clothes, another Galliano moment; half a minuet later, Bellino pulls him out of the rank of dancers and into a waltz, immediately followed by the entire ballroom, and you want to clap and cry. You can keep the second reaction for the final scene, in which Rose

Byrne, as Edith the maid, who is Casanova's Wurttemberg confidant, finds a way for him to die happy. The freedom of invention and the liberties taken serve the original libertine magnificently, and all that with the beautiful voice of Peter O'Toole.

Another great voice is heard in another BBC series. A young actor ...