Juliet of the Spirits

Made after his 1963 b&w masterpiece 8½ (a brilliant disquisition on the intersection of life and art), but before 1969's Fellini Satyricon (when the addition of the director's name to the title would signal the first in a wave of self-indulgent spectacles), Juliet of the Spirits (1965) was Fellini's first color film--in glorious Technicolor--and the results are mixed. Giulietta Masina (Fellini's radiant naïf-like wife) stars as the Juliet of the title, a neglected wife whose suspicion of her husband's infidelities leads her on a dual journey of exploration: 1) a reality-based fact-finding mission with the aid of a private eye, and 2) a fantasy-based series of dreams and hallucinations in which Juliet tests the validity of a guru's claim that "love is a religion; your husband is your god." While Fellini had purposefully broken narrative structure before to engage in controlled flights of fancy, in Juliet of the Spirits the heretofore clear line of demarcation between reality and fantasy is not only often blurry, it's occasionally obliterated. The advantage to Fellini (the child with the camera) is that he's free to pursue any whim he wishes on celluloid; the disadvantage to the viewer (who watches in real time) is that several of these digressions are of questionable value to the film (although be sure to check out the scene where a medium goes into a trance while sitting on a bed--you'll swear that it inspired Linda Blair's work in William Friedkin's The Exorcist). Still, always gorgeous to look at, especially on this Criterion-produced disc which offers a fully restored, lovingly mastered rendition that does Fellini's bright color palette more than proud, Juliet of the Spirits on DVD (which also includes a 22-minute interview with Fellini) is a strong optional purchase. (R. Pitman)