The Great Movies III

Fellini believed the movie turned the tables on his two previous films, La Dolce Vita and Fellini 81/a, which were autobiographical laments about his own problems. This one, he felt, was about Giulietta. Watching it, I was reminded of Daryl F. Zanuck, who said, "But enough about me! What did you think of my movie?"Juliet of the Spirits is not an attempt to identify with Masina's point of view, but a bald-faced exercise in Fellini's self-justification. When Juliet has fantasies, they're Fellini's fantasies. That's why at the end it isn't Federico who is burned alive.

One clue to the movie's buried message is in the casting. Giulietta Masina plays Juliet, a chain smoker with a trim little haircut and an understated wardrobe. Sandra Milo plays her neighbor Suzy, dressed flamboyantly in tight colors, feather boas, and necklines that flaunt her charms. In Fellini 8z/2, about a harassed and philandering movie director, the wife is also a chain smoker with a trim haircut-and the mistress is played by Sandra Milo, who looks exactly as she does here. In 8z/2, the director has a daydream in which his wife and mistress are friends who share in his care and feeding. InJuliet of the Spirits, Fellini seems to be suggesting that if only his wife were more like this pneumatic sex toy, she would be happier. Our conclusion: she might not be happier, but her husband certainly would be.

The movie is generally considered to mark the beginning of Fellini's decline. Some feel his great days came in the 195os, with the neorealism of La Strada (1954). International success came to him with La Dolce Vita (1959) starring Marcello Mastroianni in his first great role as a journalist who tries to balance his job, his marriage, his mistress, his erotic daydreams, and his vague ambitions. I think it's Fellini's best movie; others would argue for 81/2 (1963), which is about a director trying to make a movie despite personal, professional, and health problems. By the time of Juliet of the Spirits, the conventional view has it, Fellini was on autopilot, using his waltzing camera and jolly Nina Rota scores to recycle his phantasmagorical visions of human grotesques on parade. The only later film widely admired is Amarcord (1974).

Sometimes, however, you get your best look at an artist's style when he's indulging it. Juliet of the Spirits, Fellini's first film in color, is the work of a director who has cut loose from the realism of his early work and is toying with the images, situations, and obsessions that delight him. It is well known that young Federico experienced some kind of psychic fixation during his first visit to the circus, and all of his films feature processions or parades. It may not be too much to suggest that the sight of bizarre characters walking in time to music has a sexual component for Fellini, who almost always composes the scenes the same way: characters in background and middle distance walk in procession in time with one another, and then a foreground face appears in frame, eager to comment.

In Juliet, one of the most delightful parades occurs on the seaside, where plain Juliet has gone with her sisters and their children. Across the sand, she sees Suzy in procession with her friends, admirers, servants, and followers, dressed in bright yellow, protected by gaudy parasols, setting up a tent on the sand, beckoning invitingly to her. Later, when Juliet visits her neighbor to return her strayed cat, Suzy shares her philosophy: marriage is a life sentence for a woman, Juliet should indulge herself with one of the boy-toys Suzy can make available, her husband is not worth fretting over, etc. Suzy's home includes a chute that leads straight from her bed to a swimming pool, and a treehouse with an electric hoist that hauls up her lovers in a wicker basket.

Suzy's lifestyle may or may not be the answer to Juliet's concerns, but her home certainly looks like a bordello that Fellini might like to visit. Juliet's liberating experiences also include a seance with a medium (this is an echo from La Dolce Vita), and fears of liturgical punishment (the fearsome nuns in one scene echo the stern priests of 81/2, and both appear in flashbacks to childhood). What Fellini is doing, not subtly, is returning to his earlier films for images that he now applies to a heroine instead of a hero.