#JULIET OF THE SPIRITS HOW TO#

The side characters in Juliet of the Spirits – the initiated who are trying to show Juliet how to have a good time – are all vapid lunatics desperately seeking anything to fill their hedonistic lives with a modicum of meaning.

The latter approach, however, has some promise: it shows how the sweet life of fame and fortune – and liberated sexual mores and widely available narcotics – eventually devours itself.

Juliet of the Spirits makes Juliet look conservative and meek while Giorgio seems more attuned to the zeitgeist, having delightful forays with gorgeous women. So is the theme of the film a look at the same fissured husband-wife coupling of 8½ from the wife’s perspective? Or is it the final film in a trilogy on the ‘60s for the burgeoning creative class? The former interpretation cannot go very far if Fellini is embodying a women’s view, he sucks at doing so. This comes after a few interactions with some high-tech private investigators who take high-res photos of her cheating husband it is like she was initiated into the new age of seeing things as they are after working with men who literally see things as they are. She is awake and alert, for the first time. What happens in the second half of the film is difficult to describe – even challenging to discern, to be frank, and wide open to interpretation – but it seems that Juliet has a sort of spiritual/personal epiphany that leads to a sort of psychic break. But they help generate Juliet’s confusion at her surroundings and society it is as if, while she was in her kitchen playing the happy, dutiful housewife, the world has passed her by. These are not some of Juliet’s visions they are real. Susy’s life involves a mirror on the ceiling above her bed to get new views of her love-making, a slide leading from her bedroom to a swimming pool to freshen up after some wild sex and a basket-winch in the middle of the forest that leads to a treehouse-cum-love shack. She also gets acquainted with her seductress neighbor, Susy, played by Sandra Milo in basically an exact mimicking of her role in 8½. Juliet has something of a mid-life crisis, gets involved in several strange occult rituals and begins hallucinating all sorts of fantastical visions. The basic synopsis of Juliet of the Spirits is that protagonist Juliet, played by Fellini’s wife and the star of his earliest hit films, Giulietta Massina, is unhappy in her marriage to Giorgio (Mario Pisu), a social event organizer who she correctly suspects of fooling around. With either hermeneutic lens – the homely, lonely wife excluded from the “Sweet Life” or the final effort in a trilogy on the orgiastic bonanza of the Cinecitta golden days – the main takeaway from Juliet of the Spirits is that the plot does not much matter. For others, it is a continuation of Fellini’s previous two films ( La Dolce Vita and 8½) and their theme of the no-holds-barred, raucous, boozy, drugged Italian ‘60s (for those of a certain wealth and fame status, anyhow). For some, it is the same story of 8½ of a husband living his best life, but this time told from the perspective of his meek wife who spends most of those wild nights home alone while her man is out partying. After that, the film is a jumble of mixed feelings, twisted interpretations and puzzling messages. The most immediate reaction to the opening moments of Juliet of the Spirits is the sensation of color it was Fellini’s first color film.

Juliet of the spirits