Juliet of the Spirits 1965

Federico Fellini's female-perspective remake of his own "8 1/2" is another showcase for the director's sensitivity, extravagance, libido and philosophical brain farts. Fellini is famous for capturing the existential crisis in visual terms first and arguably better than anyone. His films from this period are filled with dreams, flashbacks, hallucinations and this film debuts the possibility of a supernatural realm. His influence on world cinema is obvious but I think its too overlooked by Americans how much he influenced their favorite Italian genre-meisters like Fulci, Argento, Bava, etc. Fellini's humor, style, technical brilliance and animator's eye is seen in so many Hollywood films and some of his biggest admirers are Terry Gilliam and David Lynch. I wonder what Hitchcock thought of him.

Fellini is certainly a fan of Hitch. They both have similar preoccupations: female characters, fashion, trauma, repression, the world of dreams. But Fellini was of his generation and took things further into the world of neurosis, sexual liberation, transcendental mysticism. I think you can make a fair comparison between Fellini's Juliet and Hitch's Marnie. These films are deep psychological journeys into the lives of women who are terrorized by the freedoms of their director's worldviews; Sympathetic portraits of women they love but don't quite understand. Critics say that these male directors failed to capture things realistically but I think both films do an amazing job in intentionally abstract, non-realistic ways. They are expressionistic parodies of female troubles and mirrors to the male problems of the directors and their past male characters. Its too easy to say Juliet is a lazy rehash because the changes in context ARE the story. From Fellini's perspective, a woman's aging, her female acquaintances, her social status, her home, her sexuality, her religious beliefs, her paternal figures are oppressive psychic forces that can be compared to the disastrous production of a movie in his previous masterpiece.

Is Juliet as great at 8 1/2 or La Dolce Vita? Maybe not in execution or inventiveness but the ambition is there and quite successful. As his first color film, its a game-changing matrix of Technicolor psychedelia. Fellini's films grew in scope, texture, design and progressive elements continually and that makes his career fun to watch even if he's less inspired. And all of his films mix an urgency and sincere emotionalism with a relaxed painterly control of its many, many elements. You get the sense he's playing to audiences, loved ones, critics and rival artists (well, we know he is from his) and he does it  with such a diplomatic panache. He's saying that is what his job is. He is inseparable from his life as a director and his characters are inseparable from him. Juliet was meant to represent his wife and maybe he is conceding that he is inseparable from her and she is inseparable from his art. Out of his trilogy of existential films, this is his most romantic and personal I think and maybe his most finely tuned, but its magic rests on its continuity with the other 2 like the finale of any trilogy.