Juliet of the Spirits is a misfire from a great director. It features some extraordinary sequences and magnificent photography, but in the end, it doesn't add up to anything.
The obsensive premise is a sort of quest for meaning, or connection, or something, by Giulietta Boldrini (played by Giulietta Masina, Fellini's wife). The movie alternates between realitivley realistic scenes (by Fellini standards), and surreal sequences meant to show Giulietta's mental state. I think. The film is a sort of cross between Nights of Cabiria and 8 1/2 with the unrelated episodes of the former and the inner mindscapes of the latter.
The biggest problem with Juliet of the Spirits is that Fellini tries to have it both ways- he wants to make both a film about a woman becoming indepenant (I think) and an absurdist fantasy. The problem is that Giulietta is never developed enough as a character for us to care about her very much. The psycholgical stuff in the picture is really unfocused. However, the movie is too grounded in reality to work as an absurdist film because goes through the motions of caring about Giulietta's characters. What we are left with is neither here nor there, and neither interesting nor insightful.
What the movie really has going for it is the geogrous cinematography. I am not exagerating when I say that if I were teaching a class on color photography, I could take this movie apart shot by shot and show how color works. It's that good.
Taken individually, the surreal scenes work as well. They would proably work on their own as a series of avant-garde short subjects. Unfortanley, the movie lacks an appropraite structure to get us to care about them when taken as a whole.
Fellini is capable of doing great character studies (I Viteloni) and wonderful comedy (And the Ship Sales On). Putting the two approches together, as he does here, was a mistake. I felt that same way watching this film as I did when I saw Orson Welles' Macbeth- a weak film by a really talented director. Oh well, we all have our off days.
Juliet of the Spirits (1965)