In a 1966 interview that Federico Fellini gave to Playboy magazine, among many other topics, he had a few things to say about Juliet of the Spirits, his then-current film. After he cited the "optimistic finale" of his previous effort 8 1/2, in which that film's protagonist Guido was "at peace with himself at last - free to accept himself as he is, not as he wished he were or might have been," the interviewer asked if his latest movie didn't have essentially the same moral. But before I quote Fellini's reply at length below, I will add that this was a significant and perceptive question, in that the films, beyond just following each other sequentially, are indeed two parts of a dyad, each exploring (from Fellini's subjective point of view) the performance anxieties experienced by their respective protagonists, the former male and the latter female. Adding further complexity and portent to the mix, 8 1/2 featured Fellini's acknowledged alter ego Marcello Mastroianni as the celebrated movie director Guido, a fictionalized version of himself, while Juliet of the Spirits starred Giulietta Masina, Fellini's wife of 20 years and a uniquely vibrant, sensitive and accomplished actor in her own right, in the titular role, about a woman approaching middle age who discovers her husband's infidelity and embarks on a spiritual quest to sort out her options as she goes forward into a new phase of her life.
Fellini himself was in his mid-40s, at the peak of his creative powers, world-renowned as a personality well beyond his fan base, surrounded by fabulous, talented, expressive and beautiful people. It's necessary to keep all that in mind when reading these interviews, because they're full of sweeping, often self-serving pronouncements that probably come across as more than a little vain and conceited if read cold, without any context. But his own experience gave him plenty of reason to think that his views mattered - on art, on human psychology and sexuality, on life's meaning and the value of human relationships - and that what he had to say connected meaningfully to a large and appreciative audience, even though one gets the feeling through his words and his films that he often struggled to figure out exactly what he was trying to express in this vastly engrossing and amusing process of vivifying his dreams and visions in the real world so that he could then capture them on film to share with the rest of us.
So here are excerpts of his thoughts on Juliet of the Spirit:
Juliet touches on myths within human psychology; its images, therefore, are those of a fable. But it treats of a profound human reality: the institution of marriage, and the need within it for individual liberation. It's the portrait of an Italian woman, conditioned by our modern society, yet a product of misshapen religious training and ancient dogmas - like the one about getting married and living happily ever after. When she grows up and finds it hasn't come true, she can neither face nor understand it; and so she escapes into a private world of remembered yesterdays and mythical tomorrows. Whatever she does is influenced by her childhood, which she recaptures in otherworldly visions; and by the future, which she brings to life in bizarre and lively fantasies... She is finally awakened from these visions by a grim reality: the desertion of her husband; but this fulfillment of her worst fear becomes the most positive episode of her life, for it forces her to find herself, to seek her identity as an individual. And this give her the insight to realize that all the fears - the phantoms that lived around her - were monsters of her own creation. bred of misshapen education and misread religion. She realizes that the spirits have been necessary, even useful, and deserve to be thanked; and the moment she thanks them, she no longer fears and hates them; and they turn into positive, pleasant beings.
Given the temporal proximity of the film's release and the occasion of these words spoken by its creator, I'm willing to accept this as a most definitive summary of Fellini's intentions and achievement in Juliet of the Spirits. He seeks to strike a universal note in offering illustration and commentary on the relational facts of life, as he and most of his peers experienced "the institution of marriage" in the mid-1960s. Still, it's nearly impossible (and unnecessary) to watch the movie without regarding it as a more distinctly personal statement on the circumstances of his own marriage to Giulietta Masina at that time. I clearly discerned a certain aspect of wishful thinking informing the development of its plot as Fellini and his fellow writers guide his heroine into a florid series of visionary escapades that conjure up haunted memories of religious indoctrination (and the corollary infusion of deep-seated, residual guilt), the grim documented proof of husband Giorgio's betrayal, and the immediate (but stoically rejected) opportunities for Juliet to indulge in carnal indiscretions of her own with a hotly pursuant Spaniard poet and admirer, or in the company of her lascivious neighbor Suzy who has a special knack for drawing the attention of potentially score-settling boy toys.
I'll give Federico credit for not goading his well-mannered, faithfully attentive wife to act out the part of a tramp, a vengeful shrew or any other variation of the vengeful harridan that a woman scorned could have been caricatured. (I doubt that Giulietta would have gone for it anyway; this role already produced enough well-documented stress between them as it was.) But in leading Juliet on this passage through all this confusion and emotional upheaval, only to arrive at a placid acceptance of her husband's indiscretions seems a bit much - an indulgence on Fellini's part that now comes across as gratuitous, somewhat condescending, an expression of unconsciously chauvinistic entitlement, regardless of his liberationist rhetoric and hearty embrace of the ethos of the sexual revolution. Perhaps his engagement with the staff and audience of Playboy shaped his own assessment of the film in this interview. But more likely, he was just caught up in the spirit of his times, a shaper and articulator of the restless cultural consensus as he drops off Juliet, en route at film's end to a vague, conveniently imparted state of Maslovian "self realization." Masina's concluding walk into the woods, shot from a distance as she ambles toward the right edge of the screen, seems to me like a calculated rejoinder, or perhaps more accurately, a balancing act, to her famously heart-breaking and tear-inducing stroll in tight close-up toward stage left at the end of Nights of Cabiria.
Another film of this era that weighed on my as I watched Juliet of the Spirits was Agnes Varda's Le bonheur. Both films pivot around a woman's response to learning that she's married to an adulterer, though Varda hardly gives us a single moment of interiority from the jilted wife's perspective. In that film, the husband is more forthcoming about his affair with another woman (grandiosely, presumptuously forthcoming, actually), and he's met with her baffling, incongruent response to this news, making love to him under the open sky in the midst of an afternoon picnic, just before tragedy strikes (though it leads to an end result perfectly to the husband's liking.) Le bonheur, every bit Juliet's equal in its sumptuous blend of color and emotionally evocative music, keeps us at a distance in exploring the subconscious motivations of its characters, even the husband Francoise with whom we spend so much time. Whereas here, Fellini wants us to get down to the root levels of what animates Juliet's heart and soul, though Masina herself doesn't really do much "acting" as a conduit to those deeper drives. Her performance mostly involves observing and reacting, using her subtle gifts of expression to convey discreetly managed emotions, harnessed in order to maintain propriety. After learning to trust her reluctant intuitions that her husband has been cheating on her, the deal-breaker that draws us to the film's conclusion arrives when Juliet has to endure the ignominy of hiring a detective so that Giorgio's philandering can be secretively captured on film. But rather than responding with the practically nihilistic self-abnegation that Varda employs to resolve the more likely outcome of strife and recriminations that a real couple would have fallen into, Fellini points the way to what he seeks to frame as a richer, fuller, post-monogamous plane of awareness. Naturally, there are no kids involved, money is not a problem, and there are plenty of fish in the sea, so all is well as the former couple transitions out of their relationship. To which I and many other observers and survivors of divorce will cheerfully call "bullshit." ;)
Still there is much to admire about Juliet of the Spirits, as a taboo-busting document of its times, a riotous extravagance of Technicolor that Fellini and his crew seized upon with wildly uninhibited zeal, and a final lead role, despite its demurely muted tones, for Masina before she settled alongside her husband as his personal care-taker, guardian and companion until death did them part. She made a few occasional appearances on film over the next few decades but this was her last true showcase. The fact that 8 1/2 inarguably went on to establish a much stronger reputation as a film of lasting impact and influence, whereas Juliet is more often considered to be a noteworthy but inferior work that signaled a marked decline for Fellini, is reflected in Criterion's dissimilar treatment of the two films. Even before 8 1/2 was upgraded to the Blu-ray format a few years ago, their respective DVD releases, just nine spine numbers apart, are a study in contrast. The former was a lavish two-disc set with abundant supplements, a commentary track, an ample, illustrated booklet, whereas the latter was (and still is) only available on a single DVD, with one short interview with Fellini about the making of the film and a brief, almost cursory essay included on the tri-fold insert. I think an upgrade is warranted - this films demands to be seen in the highest definition possibe - with an expanded supplemental package that might do well to include this fan-made video that incorporates some of the film's more visually dynamic scenes...
Next: Fists in the Pocket