The Great Movies III

Giulietta Masina was a wonderful actress (see La Strada and Nights of Cabiria) but is it my imagination, or does she seem unhappy throughout much ofJuliet of the Spirits? Masina and Fellini were said to be going through a difficult season of their marriage as the film was made (international fame had transformed Fellini from a hardworking Italian director to a star who welcomed his new privileges with open arms). Certainly Fellini does not present her as someone it would be fun to be married to. She's a houseproud little bourgeois Hummel figurine, meek, frumpy, sexually timid. As Juliet makes her way through scene after scene of harem fantasies and busty tarts on parade, she looks like nothing more than an unwilling housewife dragged by her husband to a strip show he is sure they will both enjoy.

This perception of Giuiletta/Juliet's withdrawn unhappiness adds a melancholy undertone to the movie. She's the party pooper. What was she thinking while she made the film? That first her husband flaunts his taste in grotesque eroticism, and then expects his wife to star in a movie where she's surrounded by it? The movie's last shot shows Juliet leaving her storybook home and walking off toward the nearby woods. The director and his wife argued about the meaning of this scene. To Fellini, this meant she was free. To Giulietta Masina, we learn, it meant that she was alone, abandoned, and lonely.

This subtext makes the movie more interesting than it would have been if Fellini had been more in control of his fugitive thoughts and impulses. And it's never less than dazzling to look at. It's all pretty pictures and the music of that promenading camera. In any Fellini picture and especially those from La Dolce Vita onward, characters seem to glide as if moving to unheard music. In fact, they were. Fellini, like all Italian directors of his time, did not record live sound on his sets, but dubbed all the dialog and sound effects later. That meant he was essentially making silent films, and he always had an orchestra or a record player on the set to play music, instructing his actors to walk in time. The Nina Rota scores often sound like dance music, and frequently quote old standards; the result is a film that sometimes seems on the brink of bursting into a musical.

After Juliet, Fellini made Fellini Satyricon (1970). Now that both of these movies have been re-released in newly mastered and restored 35mm prints, we can see him as the master of his canvas. He was a storyteller early in his career, but became a painter of moving images, and those who fixate on plots or messages are hunting in the wrong field. Juliet was released in America in 1966, and some audiences no doubt attended in an expanded state of consciousness. They were in the right show: a head trip, as they said. Seen in 2001, when the party is long over, it's like a streamer from last summer's dances: still bright, still gaily waving to echoes of forgotten music.

Fellini was nominated for twelve Academy Awards, but never won one. In 1993, he was given an honorary Oscar, presented by old friends Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren, and as he accepted it Giulietta wept happily in the front row. He died in October of that year. She survived him by five months.

rdinary daily life is one of the hardest things for a movie to portray, because so many other movies have trained us to expect patterns and plots. In my own 1977 review of Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep, I made that mistake of expectation, in a sentence so wrongheaded it cries out to be corrected: "But instead of making a larger statement about his characters, he chooses to show them engaged in a series of daily routines, in the striving and succeeding and failing that make up a life in which, because of poverty, there is little freedom of choice." Surely I should have seen that what Burnett chooses to show is, in fact, a larger statement. In this poetic film about a family in Watts, he observes the quiet nobility of lives lived with values but without opportunities. The lives go nowhere, the movie goes nowhere, and in staying where they are they evoke a sense of sadness and loss.

The film centers on Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders), a slaughterhouse worker who labors to exhaustion at his work and then returns to jobs at home: fixing the sink, putting down new linoleum, raising the kids. In this is he joined by his wife (Kaycee Moore), a beautiful but tired woman who freshens her makeup to welcome him home, even though he can hardly notice. Burnett regards their faces, lives, children, friends, neighbors, in a loosely strung-together series of episodes that don't add up to much, while they somehow add up to everything. His blackand-white images and deliberate editing create a sense of serene resignation; this is how it is, and ever shall be.