ΕΛΕΥΘΕΡΟΓΡΑΦΟΣ: Federico Fellini "Giulietta degli spiriti" 1965 coloured film [Juliet of the Spirits] Continental Film Review magazine February 1966 Κινηματογραφικά

Τρίτη 19 Μαρτίου 2024

Federico Fellini "Giulietta degli spiriti" 1965 coloured film [Juliet of the Spirits] Continental Film Review magazine February 1966 Κινηματογραφικά

Federico Fellini

“ Giulietta degli spiriti ”

[ English title: Juliet of the Spirits ]

1965 coloured film

Continental Film Review magazine February 1966

Κινηματογραφικά

A scene from “Giulietta degli Spiriti” which has recently had successful premieres in Paris, New York and Italy.

Born in the coastal town of Rimini, Fellini ran away, as a boy, to join a circus, and ever since, the travelling theatre and circus-style performance has held some nostalgia for him.

If two things seemed to have plagued (obsessed?) Fellini more than most it is “innocence” and the circus. The director has always been aware of the latent pathos in innocence from “La Strada” to “Le Notti di Cabiria” — in “La Dolce Vita” he even went so far as to imply that some kind salvation is possible through an innocence regained,

However, in “Eight and a Half” innocence has become something of a liability — innocence, Guido discovers, cannot face up to reality for its world is still built fundamentally on the two dimensional ideals of childhood.

“In my latest film,” Fellini has said, "my one desire has been to paint a picture of a thirty-five year old bourgeoise, catholic, who cannot escape from a doctrine she has imbibed with her mother’s milk.”

Innocence can not only create a kind of moral blackmail for someone sensitive enough to recognize its pathos, but it can also create a nightmare for the innocent herself. In “Giulietta degli Spiriti” we have just this nightmare described in a circus style sequence of fantasies created by the innocence of childhood and the innocence of immaturity.

It is this combination that gives Fellini’s film an unusual depth and while it has given the director a fantastic freedom it also provides at the same time a logic to the most bizarre image.

A remarkable scene of distorted memories and fantasies conjured up by the unhappy Giulietta in Fellini’s “Giulietta degli Spiriti”.

Giulietta is a quiet, upper middleclass wife, living at fashionable Fregene with her husband. She has a mother and two good looking sisters who reproach her constantly for her naivete — a naivete which conceives a husband’s love as inviolate.

Unfortunately her husband Giorgio has already passed beyond the initial attraction of his relationship with Giulietta and now seeks new sensations and new emotional experiences.

Gradually Giulietta comes to realise Giorgio’s infidelity. Deeply hurt, like a child, she begins to withdraw into a world of unreality and to look back on what seems to her now a secure world — the world of childhood, the innocent games and the early experiences of family life.

Lonely, her fantasies are at once, cruel, menacing, bizarre, comic and strange — they are, in fact, the result of her own changing attitudes, her impulses, her inhibitions, her desires.

She gets to know her beautiful and amoral neighbour, Susy, whose wealthy lover tolerates her unfaithfulness with complete understanding of her character. Giulietta tries to accept Susy’s world and values and all but has an affair with a handsome young man but she is too honest and loyal to be unfaithful — some would say too unsophisticated.

Susy (Sandra Milo) mounting the stairs in front of Giulietta (Giulietta Masina) is the embodiment of free, sensual love. But no matter how Giulietta wants to accept her neighbour’s way of life, her upbringing places too many inhibitions upon her.

Later, during a garden party, her mother, her self-centred sisters, Giorgio and his friends make it obvious to Giulietta that she is alone in an indifferent, if not hostile world. Her humiliation is complete when a detective agency provides proof of Giorgio’s infidelity.

On a sudden impulse Giulietta decides to confront her rival to save her marriage but when she enters the woman’s home she finds it warm and friendly and in a hundred details she senses the taste, the personality, the presence of her husband. After an unnerving wait she leaves without even seeing the woman who has ruined her happiness.

Returning home Giulietta finds Giorgio packing and ready to leave. Heartbroken she watches him go.

Alone, she rings her mother thinking she can help her — make her understand, but she is of no help and Giulietta finally resigns herself to the fact that in order to go on she must find the strength to do so within herself. This, in itself, is a basis for a new hope, a new depth of understanding. As Fellini says: “A resignation illuminated by a distant hope”.

This story is banal enough but what is completely unique is the way Giulietta is turned in on herself to seek the past and reinterpret the present in terms of pure fantasy which is given an extra logic and aesthetic appeal by the brilliant use of colour.

Of course, Fellini owes much to Freud (he has quoted Jung on woman in an interview). The bizarre but permissible logic of psychology has been artfully calculated and whereas many spectators might find Godard's eccentric and personal rumblings in “Pierrot le Fou” just a bit too much to take, most will be able to accept Fellini’s audaciousness for the different sequences, odd though they are, are given a constant growth — there is little sharp editing as in the Godard.

Fellini specializes in the long take in which many things happen at the same time — people come and go — changing lighting alters a room — the camera moves and a scene is reborn — one fantasy seems to inspire another as indeed they actually do.

One is reminded of the newspaper advertisement: all human life is here. In “Giulietta degli Spiriti” a good selection of psychological images are let loose from a kind of Kama Sutra prophet to an Arab Prince.

With “Eight and a Half” and “Giulietta degli Spiriti” Fellini has intuitively explored a personal path of development which we can only hope he will not find to be a cul-de-suc. The title of his next full-length film, “Mondo Assurdo”, looks as though he will show, not merely personal eccentrities and bizarre experiences but the bizarre nature of society itself with its artificial values and rituals that stand no rational analysis. However, a Fellini film cannot be anticipated, it must be awaited. We were a long time waiting for "Giulietta” (particularly after the Venice affair) but it has proved worth the wait.

Eroticism gets into the memories and fantasies which have now taken a strangely ordered appearance from the confusion of the illustration opposite. From Fellini’s "Giulietta degli Spiriti”.

Continental Film Review magazine, February 1966, pp. 24-25.