Juliette des esprits

Juliet of the Spirits has become one of my favorite Fellini films. The story involves a woman who discovers that her husband is cheating on her. The forces of family, tradition, the church, and an immoral society all pull at her and force her to make a difficult decision. These forces would be banal in a standard film but Fellini chooses to visualize them as images and dreams. The dream sequences are nearly perfect and create a sharp sense of the hazy logic and unreality of dreams. Other comments (as well as our friend Maltin) have noted that the symbolic nature of the film is a detriment. This is true only if you are constrained by reality and demand that film adhere to the rules you have set down (or more likely had set down for you). Taking the journey with this film is well worth the time and effort. I hesitate to state that a male director has successfully penetrated the inner desires of a woman, but in this case I think Fellini has at least come close to the mark. A film to be looked at, talked about, and enjoyed again and again.

"Juliet of the Spirits" is one way, I suppose, to make a dissatisfied bourgeois housewife's life look intriguing--a colorized "8 1/2" (1963) for writer-director Federico Fellini's actress-wife, Giulietta Masina. Most of this one involves her concern over her husband's philandering, but there's also her childhood memory--apparently, a traumatic event of some sort--of playing the central role of the martyr in a Catholic-school play. Plus, there's the circus of fashion and sex in the world of modeling and other carnivalesque endeavors that seems to surround her through her husband's work and that of her other family members, friends and neighbors. Much of this bombards her as surreal visual and audible hallucinations. I don't care to get into the Freudian or Jungian analysis of her problems, though. That nonsense is quite dull--like a lazy housewife dozing off while sunbathing on a beach. Kudos to Fellini, though, for making it look a sumptuous spectacle.

Instead of the director double standing in for Fellini in "8 1/2," who faces a creative crisis, the housewife here traces her marital trap back to the stage of her religious performance. Eventually, the promise of her salvation involves rescuing that childhood memory. This also seems to be the key, slight as it may be, to suggestions that "Juliet of the Spirits" alludes to Lewis Carroll's Alice books. I've been seeking a bunch of films inspired by that children's literature since reading them, and I came to this after reviewing Woody Allen's "Alice" (1990), which is said to be a reworking of this Fellini film, which also seems to be a slight connection to me having now viewed both, but I digress. If there is some of Carroll's Alice in Fellini's Giulietta, it's in their shared repressed childhood. Of course, the Alice books predate Freud and Surrealism and are nonsense rather than analytical, but they likewise parody their protagonist's outer reality within the dreamworld. That includes nursery rhymes and other prior children's literature. Likewise, "Juliet of the Spirits" ends up parodying film by turning it into a mode for surveillance of the husband's dalliances, or as a source of mockery via television.

Besides, akin to Wonderland, taking place along beaches, gardens and forests, note, too, how this film begins and ends visually. Within the first scene, there is a virtuoso shot through a series of looking glasses--announcing a mirror motif that continues to some extent throughout the picture. And, the ending includes the opening of a small door, so that Giulietta may finally enter the tunnel she's heretofore repeatedly shunned--especially as offered by her Caterpillar of a neighbor, who sports a butterfly tattoo (not as explicit as the White Rabbit ink in "The Matrix" (1990), but still...) and tries to show Giulietta who she may become. Although, with all the ridiculous head gear here, there really ought to be a Mad Hatter about; after all, it was a cat, like the Cheshire one with Alice, that led Giulietta to her neighbor's mad Champagne party (hey, they're Italian--not English). Moreover, the neighbor guides her quite vividly, what with the sex mirror on the ceiling, all of the deflowering going about alongside her flower-covered staircase, and the vaginal-like openings, through a pool slide and a hole to a platform in the trees (where, presumably, more sex is to occur). It's this Wonderland nonsense that's lustrous.

Really sort of the female counter part to 8 1/2, It had the same sort of dream/memory/fantasy narrative, and the same sprawling dialogue and humor, the biggest difference was this was about relationships and sexual repression and freedom, had a female lead and was in technicolor, which Fellini really makes great use of, it adds a kelidoscopic psychedelic feel to the whole movie. There really are some amazing visuals and all the dialoge is superb. Though I guess its not so much a female 8 1/2 as it is a caricature of a marriage during the sexual revolution , but it's still a funny and poignant one. Great performances and memory dialog; the sexual revolution as a circus.

I loved this movie. For me, as a relatively new student of Fellini, I understand that there is a progression in his films over the years. His initial films are more generally coherent stories like "La Strada" and then his later films are more focused on the visual and surreal, like "8 1/2".

This movie is somewhere in between. There is the coherent storyline of Juliet and her philandering husband and all the other strange characters in her life, like family and friends, but then there is also the psychedelic and surreal element of the spirit world that Juliet is in close contact with everyday.

Masina is great as usual--she acts a lot just with her eyes and the expressions on her face.

This film is just a delight. My suggestion is that you don't try to analyze it too deeply. Just sit back and let the colors, settings, costumes, and larger than life characters wash over you.

I was 15 years old when I stumbled into a cinema and caught my first Fellini film -- Juliet of the Spirits. I was so jazzed, wowed and bedazzled by it, I'm sure I went back a few more times. It led me to other Fellini films and, since, he's become my favorite film director.

Though at age 15, I shouldn't have been able to relate very well with this story of an Italian middle-aged woman and her crumbling psyche (what with her failing marriage, her unsympathetic relatives and her repressive childhood), the movie made me care about this woman and showed me sights on film that I'd never seen before.

Masina (Fellini's wife), in her performance, has nearly everything to do with making Juliet's story meaningful, even to a teenaged boy in California. The character's thoughts flash, unspoken, across her face. Her fear, her

bemusement, her insecurities--all are writ in italics and I had no trouble empathizing with Juliet.

Fellini, though, makes the film an occasion to witness how far the medium can go in bringing alive a person's inner life. The weird and awful power of (subjective) memory, the dream state, the spectres of loneliness, betrayal and Catholic mythology: all these and more overtake the screen, dominate the imagery and play the antagonists to Juliet who, as seen by the other "real" characters in the story, is just a simple, loving housewife and neighbor. Juliet finally has to face her demons and either vanquish them or go mad. By the end of the film, we know most of her demons, where they came from, whom they represent and what they mean. What an accomplishment!

In a clinical setting, Fellini dropped LSD around the time he concocted this film. That may be one reason the movie is so psychedelic. This also was his first feature in color. The music is unforgettable. Costumes should have won the Oscar, but that honor went to "Man for all Seasons".

Incidentally, I've bought and viewed the DVD of this movie. It's quite washed-out and not as good as an available VHS letterboxed version.

I'll always miss Fellini, but am so grateful that he was able to make this film and over a dozen others.