Juliet of the Spirits
Director: Federico Fellini
Year Released: 1965
Rating: 2.0
Fellini takes a voyage into the mind of his real-life wife, whose on-screen character is being cheated on by her husband (a double for Fellini himself?) - it turns out her psyche is a Technicolor dream world full of freaks, whores and symbols galore. It doesn't hold together as a movie very well - just a series of bright colors, set-pieces and odd ideas - and probably bears no relation to Masina's (or any woman's) actual subconscious (had she written it and Fellini directed it - that might have been a different story), but F. F. does succeed in creating a hallucinating world no other director would have been capable of conjuring (for better or worse). When it comes to assessing the whole of the Maestro's oeuvre, I find myself torn between David Thomson (I believe he referred to the director as a "poseur") and Roger Ebert (who praised him) - some pictures worked, some did not and some are just a mess (like this).
