Juliet of the Spirits

Rating:
Summary: Who Doesn't Daydream...?
Review: ....It's a Fellini Cine, babes!

I was--like I have been while watching other foriegn films--put off initially by the seemingly incongruous little snippets of music and visuals. I mean, couldn't those Europeans make a movie that flowed better? Jeez! I open my mind, watched it a few times and came to these conclusions. First, Giulietta, the actress, must have been a bit off to have done this apparently semi-real story abouat a middle aged woman married to a famous director who she suspects is having an affair. I mean, she was married to Fellini when this was produced. Second, albeit the digital reprocessing has made the cinema more vivid and the costuming more striking, the women more sexier, it showed it's date. When Juliet goes to confront the lady about l'affair, she should have kick the B*'s tail. That probably would have been the response for a character in a current day movie. Third, in an odd sort of way, it all but helps a more modern Eyes Wide Open to make some kind of sense. I mean, who can say how we will respond when a whiff of infidelity comes into our relationships, our lives? Juliet's response were these visions. Some of these were from her far away youth. Some just were pure Fellini bacchanalia. Tom Cruise in Eyes was thinking well, if my wife can *think* it, well, I can just *do* it and be one up on her. It starts for Tom as 'getting even', but it corrodes into something else that he had no control over. (I always say we are forever one step from a huge disaster and we don't know it....) We see Juliet almost giving into her urges with the pretty Latin kid who she meets at her neighbor's...but something just doesn't feel right.

And so, that's what this film is about. What we go thru when we suspect something or hear some painful news. We have the brilliant Guilietta Masina and the surreal Fellini to thank for giving these emotions some sort of form..

Rating:
Summary: Warning!...¡Advertencia!
Review: A friendly warning for Europe travellers or residents: do not buy the DVD version of this movie, available in Spain, no matter how much it costs. It was once mutilated by the Franco censors in those dark years, and nobody took the precaution to look for the original version to put it back in the market in the 21st Century. Shameful.

Advertencia para los clientes españoles. No compréis la versión en DVD de esta película que venden en España. Es la versión mutilada por la censura franquista ya que, al parecer, nadie se dio el trabajo de buscar una versión original para reeditarla. Una vergüenza.

Rating:
Summary: Like a Ton of Bricks
Review: After "81/2," Fellini came apart as an artist. And how have the mighty fallen! Nowhere in film is there a comparable example of an artist at the absolute height of his powers suddenly falling so short of everyone's expectations. "Juliet of the Spirits" happens to be not merely an artistic failure - it reveals a moral failure in Fellini. Hereafter, his films would become inexcusably more and more self-indulgent. The filmmaker who made "The White Sheik" and "Nights of Cabiria" left us so suddenly. Fellini may as well have been run over by a lorry.

Rating:
Summary: WARNING
Review: DO NOT BUY THIS MOVIE. It is cut by over 10 minuts. Do not support this kind of bad realeses. It is a pity for the film is really very god and is worth a better destiny than this. To Image Entertainment: DO NOT CUT MOVIES.

Rating:
Summary: FELLINI'S BEST FILM?
Review: Federico Fellini's films often reflected an enticing and disturbing dreamworld. "JULIET OF THE SPIRITS" is his first color film and it is a delight to see the bright, vivid colors again. All previous existing prints on tape were deplorable transfers.

Simply put, the story focuses on a wealthy Italian housewife in her 30s and the interior metamorphosis she undergoes as she experiences the passages, events and changes in her life, most notably her husband's unfaithfulness. A husband she loves. No words can do justice to the stunning visuals -- cinematography, costumes and production design.

Many film buffs consider this Fellini's best film -- even better than his autobiographical "81/2" -- a film that is in many ways the psychological flip side of "Juliet."

Fellini was one of only a handful of world class filmmakers that was fully actualized as an artist. He could not only break the rules, but make new ones. And no one excelled better than he in visualizing an elliptical, ephemeral dreamstate that still speaks to our deepest feelings in a unique and fresh style.

Nina Rota's fantastical score raises the intensity of the images and nuances the fleeting emotions. See this great movie for the first time and discover a genius and humanist who painted with light.

Thanks to Criterion for continuing the tradition of gathering the greatest films from the finest filmmakers around the world and publishing them in editions that offer the highest technical quality and award-winning, original supplements.

Rating:
Summary: Semi-enigmatic Fellini
Review: Fellini is, no doubt, a genius. However, sometimes one wonders what the point of his movies are? Not as abstract as "Roma," nonetheless, this is a bit puzzling at times and cannot easily be recommended to even some of the more enthusiastic movie collectors. Is it really this complex and surreal in our lives?

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Summary: Giulietta's Swan Song
Review: Fellini's "Juliet of the Spirits" is perhaps his most beguiling. This, his first color film, garnered mixed reviews when it was first released, mainly because it was truly ahead of its time. Today, it is universally considered an outright classic. The film is a tribute to the magnificent Giulietta Masina and her haunting ability to blend pathos and near-pantomime. This film is about war--war against the forces of inner turmoil, despair, sexuality, and dependency. Juliet is the inviolate, loyal, desperate victim amid an absolutely crushing kaleidoscope of physical/spiritual entities. To watch this film with the eye of one who suffers and struggles to be free from interior demons is to feel the poetic mystery of Fellini's great lesson about life: need only yourself, don't fear happiness.

Rating:
Summary: Okay transfer of a Great Film
Review: First let me say that I'm grateful to have a fairly decent rendition of one of my favorite films. This film epitomizes what came to be known as Felliniesque - a lavish subconscious "theme and varriations" on the subject of marriage, sensuality and guilt. It's also the film that makes the best use of color than any other I've seen. Because I've seen "Juliet" many times in theaters I can say with some authority that the DVD transfer lacks the sharpness and vivid color of the original. In general it's too dark and focus is soft. The biggest problem is the sound which is constantly out of sync by a quarter second (at least on my player). I know Fellini always post dubbed his voices but effects and music were always in sync. There is also a harshness to the sound and at times some distortion. On the plus side, the print had no scratches and with the exception of a few strange clipped transitions (noticible by the soundtrack) seems to be the complete film. I'd have to disagree with another reviewer here who says that much is missing. It's basically the same version remember seeing over the years. I live in the US though and perhaps there was a longer Europeon version. This is one of Fellini's most hallucinatory pictures. The combination of hyper-rich color and costume combined with Nino Rota's curious score make for a completely unique viewing experience.

Rating:
Summary: The most "Felliniesque" of Fellini films--& the most moving
Review: Giulietta is a wealthy, mousy Roman housewife who lives on the margins of her own supposed milieu. Dominated by her beautiful, haughty mother (who can barely tolerate her) and her tall and glamorous sisters, patronized by her rich ding-a-ling friends mostly because of her sympathetic nature (but secretly held in contempt by them for her lack of beauty), Giulietta hides instead in her perfect house with her servants--the only people she can really call her friends--and in her fantasies of her marriage to her jetsetting husband, who seems never to be around. As Giulietta comes to suspect what everyone else has known for years--that he is cheating in her--she simultaneously begins to be visited by spirits who seem to have something to tell her. But as she learns more of her husband's infidelities, and comes to examine the emptiness of her own life, Giulietta's spirits seem less like actual supernatural presences and more like manifestations of a descent into madness.

This is by no means Fellini's "best" film, but it is the one most people think of when they use the adjective "Felliniesque." The fantasy sequences, the striking use of color (particularly orange--this was his first color film, and he really went to town), the decadent Sixties fashions, and the gorgeous stauesque women who seem to have invaded from outer space: they're all here, and many of the sequences in this film have been parodied again and again. Its imitations come for a good reason: the film is utterly absolutely unforgettable. There are sequences in it that are as fine or as memorable as anything Fellini has ever done--particularly the great lawn party sequence, where Giulietta finally breaks down.

There are many things wrong with the film: the script doesn't make a whole lot of sense at times, and the fantasy sequences seem less like something Giulietta would imagine and more like Fellini's usual obsessions (statuesque women, the circus, etc.). And as superbly icy as Caterina Boratto is as Giulietta's mother ("Nice kimono," she sneers at her daughter at the lawn party), did he really have to cast actresses twice as tall as his Giulietta to be her mother and sisters? (Even if we are to accept that most of the movie is from her point of view, it still stretches belief.) What makes it all work so brilliantly in the end, though, is the director's sense of filmic narrative drive (beautifully orchestrated to Nino Rota's famous score) and the performance of the lead actress, Giulietta Masina, who makes it all really matter. Although Masina has not been as praised for this role as much as for her work in CABIRIA and LA STRADA, her work here is every bit as fine, and perhaps better for its greater subtlety. Watch her expression the first time she sees one of her visions after she closes her eyes on the beach--or her astounding range in the lawn party sequence as she segues from forced cheerfulness to utter helplessness to rage, and then finally to despair. (When she finally loses it at her guests and screams at them, it's hard to say what is more memorable: her moment of fury or her terrifyingly lost expression when she realizes they haven't even noticed). Although you really should see this on the big screen (and on as clear a print as possible), this is a film every student of film should see.

Rating:
Summary: The 32 pack of crayons.
Review: Having never seen any of Fellini's films I didn't know what to expect from this. I don't have much to say on the themes presented in this film because I am not going to pretend to understand them. However I don't think understanding is the point.

The best thing about this film is that Fellini realized (much unlike 99.9 percent of film-makers working today) that he was working with a color palette. It's just a dazzling display of brilliant images that get stranger as the film progresses.