One needn't be familiar with the opera to approach this sumptuous film, but those familiar with Losey will surely recognize his hand in the rivetingly thematic visuals, and the dark edge with which he traces the exploits of the legendary seducer. As Martyn Auty wrote in Monthly Film Bulletin (condensed here), "The ideological pattern of this Don Giovanni is one of hysteria held in check by classicism. The visual contradictions of the cool, rectangular lines of the architecture and the exotic eighteenth-century frescoes on the Palladian villa encapsulate the tensions of Losey's direction, alternatively letting the characters run riot (in a series of lengthy, fluid tracking sequences) and trapping them in formal compositions that are either theatrical (the sequences played inside the Teatro Olimpico) or consciously painterly (the scenes of barges ferrying characters through the Venetian marshlands)."